Egypt president declares emergency after clashes kill dozens

Sabahy's Popular Current movement said in a statement the protests are due to economic and political problems that need to be addressed by policies and not through "security solutions".

Front leader Mohamed ElBaradie described the dialogue "a waste of time" on his Twitter account.

State television said seven people died from gunshot wounds in Port Said on Sunday. Port Said's head of hospitals, Abdel Rahman Farag, told Reuters more than 400 people had suffered from teargas inhalation, while 38 were wounded by gunshots.

Gunshots had killed many of the 33 who died on Saturday when residents rioted after a court sentenced 21 people, mostly from the Mediterranean port, to death for their role in deadly soccer violence at a stadium there last year.

A military source said many people in Port Said, which lies next to the increasingly lawless Sinai Peninsula, possess guns because they do not trust the authorities to protect them. However it was not clear who was behind the deaths and injuries.

In Cairo, police fired teargas at dozens at protesters throwing stones and petrol bombs in a fourth day of clashes over what demonstrators there and in other cities say is a power grab by Islamists two years after Mubarak was overthrown.

In Ismailia city, which lies on the Suez Canal between the cities of Suez and Port Said, police also fired teargas at protesters attacking a police station with petrol bombs and stones, according to witnesses and a security source there.

'KNEE-JERK REACTION'

Most of the deaths since Thursday were in Port Said and Suez, both cities where the army has now been deployed.

Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch in Cairo said a state of emergency reintroduced laws that gave police sweeping powers of arrest "purely because (people) look suspicious".

"It is a classic knee-jerk reaction to think the emergency law will help bring security," she said. "It gives so much discretion to the Ministry of Interior that it ends up causing more abuse which in turn causes more anger."

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