The 30 June Fact Finding Committee announced that 607 protesters were killed during the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in dispersal in August 2013. The committee made its announcement in a report released Wednesday during a press conference at the Shura Council. The report includes verified data on political-events casualties since former president Mohamed Morsi's ouster in 2013. The report is divided into two sections, the first tackling the assemblies in public spaces, while the other tackled events at Rabaa Al-Adaweya. Head of Committee Fouad Riad announced in the conference that the Rabaa Al-Adaweya assembly started peacefully but then weapons spread among protesters, amid loose security measures. He also said the first casualty was amongst police ranks, which urged them to respond and escalate the violence. The 800-page report by the 17-member committee documented 607 deaths from protesters and 8 deaths and 156 injured from the policemen in Rabaa Al-Adaweya. Riad condemned the police role in their "brutal" reaction against the protests, and held the government accountable for the number of casualties. The report also investigated issues including the Itihadeya events, torching churches and assaulting Christians, university violence, assassination attempts, the situations in the Suez Canal and Sinai, and torture and terrorism incidents. During the press conference, the committee reviewed video excerpts and documents in the report for approximately 30 minutes. The report documented 64 incidents of church attacks across Egypt especially in rural areas, and condemned the role of police in preventing Christians from fleeing from some villages. The committee is an independent national entity formed after the 30 June uprising to document the events surrounding it. This is the second time the committee has received an extension. It has been working over the past months on verifying the new data and filtering it to compose the full report that documents the events that took place from June 2013 to June 2014. Committee spokesman Amr Marwan said the committee has received a "huge amount" of videos and documents from families and official entities.
