PORT SAID, Egypt — Thousands of soccer fans have enforced a work stoppage in Egypt’s restive city of Port Said to protest “injustices” by the government, disrupting rail services and forcefully evicting workers from their factories and the provincial government’s offices.
The “Green Eagles” fan club also disrupted work in the Mediterranean city’s main telephone exchange and sent students home from several schools in their Sunday protest.
Port Said, at the northern tip of the Suez Canal, has seen a wave of violence following a Jan. 26 court ruling that sentenced to death 21 people, many of them local soccer fans, for their part in a stadium melee a year ago that killed more than 70 people. Most of those killed in the melee were visiting fans of Cairo’s Al-Ahly team.