Police have arrested an Egyptian for lobbing a fire bomb to disperse a crowd at a provincial depot selling cheap butane gas cylinders, local newspapers reported on Sunday. The 26-year-old man told investigators he had used the bomb after failing to get a cylinder due to overcrowding outside the depot in the town of Kafr Shukr, located 70 kilometres north of Cairo, according to the paper.
The bomb sparked a fire and injured one female customer, police said. Gas cylinders - heavily subsidised by the government - are widely used in parts of Egypt that have no access to home gas supplies.