CAIRO - Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf expressed regret on Monday for a violent crackdown on demonstrators in Cairo at the weekend and said he had asked the minister of justice to investigate. "All of us, the people, the army and the government, feel regret for the events of last Saturday," Sharaf said in a speech broadcast on Egyptian television. Rights groups accused the army of using excessive force when it tried to remove protesters early on Saturday, hours after hundreds of thousands had massed for one of the biggest protests since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted. Medical sources said 13 men were wounded by gunfire and two people died when the army tried to clear the protesters from Tahrir Square during a 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. "There are demands by the people over what happened, to find out the facts, and for that I have asked my colleague the minister of justice to take the necessary steps to assure that those demands are achieved," Sharaf said. He said legal steps against Mubarak were going ahead despite a statement by the former president, broadcast on Sunday, that he and his family were not guilty of corruption. "Concerning the statement broadcast by the former president, all I can say is that the legal procedures are going ahead, as the minister of justice and the public prosecutor have said." Egypt's public prosecutor summoned Mubarak on Sunday as part of probes into the killing of protesters and the embezzlement of public funds. The state news agency MENA had earlier reported that Sharaf would, in his response to Mubarak's statement, say that no one was above the law, but this was not included in Sharaf's speech.
