Khaled Said anniversary

I’m sorry to say it totally slipped my mind yesterday in Venice (if in Egypt it would have been impossible to miss): the one-year anniversary of Khaled Said’s death at the hands of the Alexandria police.

Here’s SOME VIDEO of yesterday’s protests.

As stated before on this blog, you could feel the change in the national mood last year after this horrible incident. It helped turn many fence-sitters against Mubarak, setting the stage for January 2011.

It wasn’t just the death itself, which one might normally write off as the act of a pair of rogue cops working without official direction. It was the fact that the police felt perfectly safe in beating him to death shamelessly on a public street in front of numerous witnesses, and the additional fact that the autopsy reports were an insult to the national intelligence.