CAIRO: In front of the Coptic Hospital on the morning after the clashes, with every coffin that came through, women screamed, “Akhoya!” (my brother), amid the prayers and crying. At the beginning, the two siblings didn't want to talk about their brother's death because they were scared the story would be modified in favor of the Military Council. They asked me to promise to write exactly what they said – and I did. Wael Bishay, was at the protest on Sunday night when he lost his brother, Ayman. “We tried to reach an ambulance but we were told that ambulances were given strict orders not to go to Maspero,” Wael told me, adding that he had to carry his dead brother's body on a motorcycle, because there were no ambulances. Wael and Ayman were marching when the clashes took place. While Wael survived with only minor injuries, Ayman was run over by an armored vehicle that resulted in his immediate death. “His ribs and limbs were broken and his head was crushed,” told me Manal, Ayman's older sister, as she pointed to her chest and fought against her tears. Forty-year-old Ayman, who was not married and had no kids, initially supported the military, but after the Abbassia incident, he lost his trust for them. “I saw dead bodies being thrown in the Nile,” said Wael, assuring me that the deaths are more than what we were told. With tears running down her cheeks, Mariam Shehata wore black and watched closely as the coffins came through, “I carried a 12-year-old boy's body in my arms last night who had received two shots in the back,” she told me. She screamed and slapped her face the way Arab women do when someone dies. Interrupting my conversation with Mariam, an older man said to me, “Write down that we want foreign intervention! Write down that we want international protection.” Another man standing by him tried to calm him down, shaking his head as if it were nonsense. I heard the same man later scream, “Obama is a terrorist!” and that Bush was a much better president. His voice was shaking as if he was in shock – and like almost everybody else in front of the hospital, he had tears running down his face. BM
