Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has said it planned to march in the capital, Cairo, reiterating it remained committed to a peaceful struggle, a day after hundreds of its supporters were killed in a bloody security crackdown in the capital.
"Marches are planned this afternoon from Al-Iman mosque to protest the deaths," the Islamist group said in a statement on Thursday even as the country remained in a state of emergency.
World leaders condemned the attack on protesters camped out in the Egyptian capital calling for reinstatement of Mohamed Morsi, country’s first freely elected president, who was deposed by the army on July 3.
"We will always be non-violent and peaceful. We remain strong, defiant and resolved," Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad wrote on his Twitter feed.
"We will push (forward) until we bring down this military coup," he added.
Nationwide protests, including Alexandria and numerous towns and cities, erupted after the Cairo crackdown that left at least 525 people dead.
An Egyptian Health Ministry spokesman, Khaled el-Khateeb, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the number of injured in the previous day's violence had risen to 3,572.
Al Jazeera's Jane Ferguson reporting from al-Imam Mosque in Cairo's Nasr City, said: "There are absolutely horrific scenes here just as funerals begins. The bodies are all across the floor surrounded by bloody shrouds. Lots of relatives crying, lots of anger."
"We have seen coffins being brought steady stream in here now there are already 100 bodies behind me."
"Funerals of those are about to start in many parts of the country," Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, reporting from Cairo, said.
The military-installed government defended the clamp down, saying the authorities had no choice but to act.
Al Jazeera's Hanna also said that the "the cabinet was meeting to discuss the present situation. A statement was expected later in the day.
The curfew clamped overnight was relaxed in the morning and traffic started flowing through the areas where clashes occurred on Wednesday.
At the site of one Cairo sit-in, garbage collectors cleared still-smouldering piles of burnt tents on Thursday. Soldiers dismantled the stage at the heart of the protest camp. A burnt out armoured vehicle stood abandoned in the street.
Call for UN debate
In Ankara, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called on Thursday for the UN Security Council to convene quickly and act after what he described as a massacre in Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood has said the true death toll was far higher, with a spokesman saying 2,000 people had been killed in the "massacre".
It was impossible to verify the figures independently given the extent of the violence.
The military-installed government has declared a month-long state of emergency and imposed the dusk-to-dawn curfew on Cairo and 10 other provinces, restoring to the army powers of arrest and indefinite detention it held for decades until the fall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak in a 2011 popular uprising.
Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, resigned in dismay at the use force instead of a negotiated end to the six-week standoff.
Other liberals and technocrats in the interim government did not follow suit. Interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi spoke in a televised address of a "difficult day for Egypt" but said the government had no choice but to order the crackdown to prevent anarchy spreading.
Al Jazeera's Hanna said: "The opinion in Egypt within itself is sharply divided, with the broad opposition umbrella body National Salvation Front welcoming the action, saying that it was necessary to maintain democracy."
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