CAIRO – Would-be looters broke into Cairo's famed Egyptian Museum, ripping the heads off two mummies and damaging about 10 small artifacts before being caught and detained by army soldiers, Egypt's antiquities chief said Saturday.
Zahi Hawass said the vandals did not manage to steal any of the museum's antiquities, and that the prized collection was now safe and under military guard.
With mass anti-government protests still roiling the country and unleashing chaos on the streets, fears that looters could target other ancient treasures at sites across the country prompted the military to dispatch armored personnel carriers and troops to the Pyramids of Giza, the temple city of Luxor and other key archaeological monuments.
Hawass said now that the Egyptian Museum's collection is secure from thieves, the greatest threat to the collection inside is posed by the torched ruling party headquarters building next door.
"What scares me is that if this building is destroyed, it will fall over the museum," Hawass said as he watched fire trucks spray water on the still smoldering NDP headquarters.
The museum, which is home to the gold mask of King Tutankhamun that draws millions of tourists a year, also houses thousands of artifacts spanning the full sweep of Egypt's rich pharaonic history.
"It is the great repository of Egyptian art. It is the treasure chest, the finest sculptures and treasures from literally 4,000 years of history," said Thomas Campbell, the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art by telephone. "If it is damaged through looting or fire, it would be a loss to all humankind."
The museum is located near some of the most intense of the mass anti-government protests sweeping the capital, and Egyptian army commandoes secured the building and its grounds early Saturday morning.
Before the army arrived, young Egyptians — some armed with truncheons grabbed off the police — created a human chain at the museum's front gate to prevent looters from making off with any of its priceless artifacts.
"They managed to stop them," Hawass said. He added that the would-be looters only vandalized two mummies, ripping their heads off. They also cleared out the museum gift shop.
The prized King Tutankhamun exhibit had not been damaged and was safe, he said.
An Associated Press Television News crew that was allowed into the museum saw two vandalized mummies and at least 10 small artifacts that had been taken out of their glass cases and damaged.
Fears of looters have prompted authorities elsewhere to take precautions to secure antiquities at other sites.
The military closed the pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo to tourists, and armored personnel carriers could be seen outside the famed archaeological site.
Archaeologist Kent Weeks, who is in the southern temple town of Luxor, said that rumors that attacks were planned against monuments prompted authorities to erect barriers and guard Karnak Temple while tanks were positioned around Luxor's museum.
Sharon Herbert, director of the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan, which is home to a collection of Egyptian artifacts, said any looting or damage at Egypt's museums would be a tragedy.
"Anything can happen when crowds get out of control," Herbert said. "You're hard put to put any monetary price on these things. They're priceless. They're parts of the whole world heritage that can't be replaced." •
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Looters pillage Egyptian antiquities warehouses
Ismailia, Egypt Jan 31, 2011(Reuters) - Looters have pillaged a number of warehouses containing ancient Egyptian artifacts, stealing and damaging some of them, archaeologists and warehouse workers said on Monday.
A group of looters attacked a warehouse at the Qantara Museum near the city of Ismailia on the Suez Canal that contained 3,000 objects from the Roman and Byzantine periods, a source at the tourism police said.
Many of the objects had been found in Sinai by the Israelis after they occupied the peninsula during the 1967 war with Egypt, and had only been recently returned to Egypt.
A worker at the warehouse said the looters had said they were searching for gold. The worker told them there was no gold but they continued to pillage the storehouse, smashing some items and taking others.
An archaeologist said warehouses near the pyramids of Saqqara and Abu Sir were also looted.
"At other locations, guards and villagers were able to successfully repel gangs of looters," the archaeologist said.
On Friday, looters broke into the Cairo museum, home to the world's greatest collection of Pharaonic treasures, smashing several statues and damaging two mummies, while police battled anti-government protesters on the streets.
The culture, monuments, temples and pyramids of ancient Egypt have left a lasting legacy on the world and are a major draw for the country's tourism industry. •
OBAMA CALLS FOR RESTRAINT, REFORM IN EGYPT
A crowd chants in front of the White House in Washington, Jan. 29, 2011
demanding that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak step down.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama issued a plea for restraint in Egypt after meeting with national security aides Saturday to assess the Cairo government's response to widespread protests threatening the stability of the country.
A White House statement said Obama "reiterated our focus on opposing violence and calling for restraint, supporting universal rights, and supporting concrete steps that advance political reform within Egypt."
But Obama offered no reaction to President Hosni Mubarak's decision earlier Saturday to name a vice president for the first time since coming to power nearly 30 years ago. Mubarak appointed his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who's well respected by American officials. The president also fired his Cabinet.
Five days of protests have left at more than 70 dead.
Before Suleiman's appointment, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. wanted to see Mubarak fulfill his pledges of reform as protests swept the country.
"The Egyptian government can't reshuffle the deck and then stand pat," Crowley said on his Twitter account. "President Mubarak's words pledging reform must be followed by action."
Crowley said Egyptians "no longer accept the status quo. They are looking to their government for a meaningful process to foster real reform."
After speaking to Mubarak by telephone late Friday, Obama delivered a four minute statement calling on the Egyptian leader to take steps to democratize his government and refrain from using violence against his people.
As events unfolded Saturday, Obama and his advisers kept a low profile. •
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The day part of the Internet died: Egypt goes dark
SAN FRANCISCO -- About a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead.
Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the Internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of President Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30-year rule, experts said.
Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.
A protester is carried away after being shot in Sheik Zuweid in the northern Sinai area of Egypt in this image taken from TV on Thursday Jan. 27, 2011. The man later died of his injuries . Violence escalated outside the capital Cairo Thursday where anti-government protesters torched a fire station and looted weapons that they then turned on police.
Egypt's top democracy advocate returned to the country and declared he was ready to lead the campaign to oust longtime President Hosni Mubarak.
Experts say it's unlikely that what's happened in Egypt could happen in the United States because the U.S. has numerous Internet providers and ways of connecting to the Internet. Coordinating a simultaneous shutdown would be a massive undertaking.
"It can't happen here," said Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer and a co-founder of Renesys, a network security firm in Manchester, N.H., that studies Internet disruptions. "How many people would you have to call to shut down the U.S. Internet? Hundreds, thousands maybe? We have enough Internet here that we can have our own Internet. If you cut it off, that leads to a philosophical question: Who got cut off from the Internet, us or the rest of the world?"
In fact, there are few countries anywhere with all their central Internet connections in one place or so few places that they can be severed at the same time. But the idea of a single "kill switch" to turn the Internet on and off has seduced some American lawmakers, who have pushed for the power to shutter the Internet in a national emergency.
The Internet blackout in Egypt shows that a country with strong control over its Internet providers apparently can force all of them to pull their plugs at once, something that Cowie called "almost entirely unprecedented in Internet history."
The outage sets the stage for blowback from the international community and investors. It also sets a precedent for other countries grappling with paralyzing political protests - though censoring the Internet and tampering with traffic to quash protests is nothing new.
China has long restricted what its people can see online and received renewed scrutiny for the practice when Internet search leader Google Inc. proclaimed a year ago that it would stop censoring its search results in China.
In 2009, Iran disrupted Internet service to try to curb protests over disputed elections. And two years before that, Burma's Internet was crippled when military leaders apparently took the drastic step of physically disconnecting primary communications links in major cities, a tactic that was foiled by activists armed with cell phones and satellite links.
Computer experts say what sets Egypt's action apart is that the entire country was disconnected in an apparently coordinated effort, and that all manner of devices are affected, from mobile phones to laptops. It seems, though, that satellite phones would not be affected.
"Iran never took down any significant portion of their Internet connection - they knew their economy and the markets are dependent on Internet activity," Cowie said.
But when there's no Internet at all, proxies can't work and online communication grinds to a halt.
Renesys' network sensors showed that Egypt's four primary Internet providers - Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr - and all went dark at 12:34 a.m. Those companies shuttle all Internet traffic into and out of Egypt, though many people get their service through additional local providers with different names.
Italy-based Seabone said no Internet traffic was going into or out of Egypt after 12:30 a.m. local time.
"There's no way around this with a proxy," Cowie said. "There is literally no route. It's as if the entire country disappeared. You can tell I'm still kind of stunned."
The technical act of turning off the Internet can be fairly straightforward. It likely requires only a simple change to the instructions for the companies' networking equipment.
Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., security company, said that in countries such as Egypt - with a centralized government and a relatively small number of fiber-optic cables and other ways for the Internet to get piped in - the companies that own the technologies are typically under strict licenses from the government.
"It's probably a phone call that goes out to half a dozen folks who enter a line on a router configuration file and hit return," Labovitz said. "It's like programming your TiVo - you have things that are set up and you delete one. It's not high-level programming."
Twitter confirmed Tuesday that its service was being blocked in Egypt, and Facebook reported problems.
"Iran went through the same pattern," Labovitz said. "Initially there was some level of filtering, and as things deteriorated, the plug was pulled. It looks like Egypt might be following a similar pattern."
The ease with which Egypt cut itself also means the country can control where the outages are targeted, experts said. So its military facilities, for example, can stay online while the Internet vanishes for everybody else.
Experts said it was too early to tell which, if any, facilities still have connections in Egypt.
Cowie said his firm is investigating clues that a small number of small networks might still be available.
Meanwhile, a program Renesys uses that displays the percentage of each country that is connected to the Internet was showing a figure that he was still struggling to believe. Zero. •
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US warns Americans to defer travel to Egypt
WASHINGTON -- The State Department is urging Americans to defer any non-essential travel to Egypt because of the large anti-government protests and warning U.S. citizens already in the country to stay put until the situation stabilizes.
In a travel alert issued on Friday, the department said the situation in the capital, Cairo, and other cities is volatile as the military and security forces move to quell the demonstrations. It said Americans in Egypt now should remain in their homes or hotels until calm is restored.
Although the demonstrations are not directed against U.S. or Western interests, the department noted that protests have turned violent, resulting in deaths, injuries and major property damage.•
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Blessings to you in these troubled times. -Missygirl*
