Police on Monday stopped Egyptians voting in some areas where the opposition Muslim Brotherhood is strong, in the first elections under an amended constitution that makes life harder for the Islamists.
Brotherhood candidates in the upper house elections complained that government agents beat them up inside polling stations and committed electoral abuses including stuffing ballot boxes before voting started. Riot police sealed off at least two polling stations in Ausim north-west of Cairo and a bystander said: "It's because there are lots of Brotherhood supporters here." A police officer who asked not to be named cited "national security".
Police used the same method to reduce the Brotherhood vote in the northern coastal town of Baltim, where women in Islamic headscarves said police had turned them away, witnesses said. "What freedom are they talking about?" said Amani, a woman who refused to give her last name. "No freedom! They won't allow us in," several women chanted.
Independent monitors said that preventing access to polling stations was one of the most common electoral abuses by the government in the parliamentary elections of 2005, when the Brotherhood proved its status as the main opposition force.
An Interior Ministry spokesman told a news conference that voting was proceeding calmly and satisfactorily. The elections, for the less powerful upper house or Shoura Council, are a test case for constitutional and legislative changes, which ban religious slogans and symbols - seen as an attempt to drive the Islamists out of mainstream politics.
In many areas only a trickle of people bothered to vote, eyewitnesses said, but the Brotherhood's decision to challenge the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) in 19 of the 88 seats at stake made them more competitive than in previous years.
A Brotherhood candidate in Kafr el-Sheikh province, Ashraf el-Said, said police and others beat him up when he grabbed ballot papers from election officials who were filling them in on behalf of the ruling party.
"About 20 people - police, security and the civil servants - pounced on me. I have injuries on my hands, signs of biting, I was punched in the face and my clothes are a mess," he told Reuters by telephone. Nagi Sakr, another Brotherhood candidate, said about 13 men he described as police informers and thugs attacked him and his companions in a polling station in the Delta town of Zagazig.
"It seems they are trying to create any sort of problem to cripple the electoral process and to conceal vote rigging," the candidate told Reuters. The Brotherhood said police had detained at least 160 of its organisers and election agents since voting started. El-Desouki Kuleib, the Brotherhood candidate in Tanta, said some ballot boxes at one school had hundreds of ballot papers when only a handful of people had voted. Yasser el-Hagg, one of Sakr's representatives, told Reuters he found a stuffed ballot box hidden at Zagazig Girls' Secondary School shortly after the polling station opened.
The Brotherhood estimated that by mid-afternoon about 6,000 of about 450,000 people in the Zagazig constituency had voted - a turnout of about 1.3 percent. In an unrelated dispute, one man was killed in an exchange of gunfire between supporters of the NDP and of an independent candidate in the Nile Delta, police sources said.
The current elections are for 88 of the 176 elected seats in the upper house, which has wider powers under the constitutional amendments approved in March. The NDP has already won 11 of those seats because its candidates did not face any opposition.