As unprecedented protests rock Egypt, journalists are apparently being targeted by Egyptian police.
Assad Sawey, a reporter for BBC Arabic, was beaten and bloodied by the police. He managed to make it in front of the BBC's cameras, bandaged and still drenched in his own blood, to tell the story of what happened to him.
He said he was watching a protest of 15,000 people when plainclothes police surrounded him and his camera crew. "They didn't care about BBC or any other organization, " he said. "They were targeting journalists."
They arrested Sawey, and beat him with steel bars and ones he said were electrified. The police were, he said, "very very brutal."
The Committee To Protect Journalists also reports that Ahmad Mansour, a journalist for Al-Jazeera, was detained for over an hour, and that several journalists were prevented from entering Egypt through Cairo's airport. In addition, four French journalists were reportedly arrested by police.
Another journalist, CNN's Ben Wedeman, saw Egyptian police take the camera of the photojournalist he was with.
According to Wedeman, who told the story of the confrontation on CNN Friday morning, the police grabbed a camera from his fellow journalist, Mary Rogers, cracked the camera's viewfinder and took it away.