Three Dead

CAIRO — Thousands of people calling for the end of the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak clashed with riot police officers here in the capital and in other Egyptian cities on Tuesday, on a day of some of the most serious civil unrest in recent memory.

Three people were reported killed, two protesters in the port town of Suez and a soldier who died of injuries sustained during the protests in Cairo.

The protesters, mobilized largely on the Internet and energized by recent events in Tunisia, occupied one of the city’s most famous squares for hours, beating back attempts to dislodge them by police officers wielding tear gas and water cannons.

“Freedom, freedom, freedom,” they chanted. “Where are the Egyptian people?”

Security officials said several thousand people demonstrated in Alexandria, and there were reports of large demonstrations in other cities, including Mansoura and Mahalla al-Kobra. There, a video posted on the Internet showed people tearing up a large portrait of Mr. Mubarak — an act whose boldness here is hard to overstate.

State television made no mention of the protests, and sporadically through the afternoon, cellphone networks were interrupted or unavailable.

There was no immediate count of arrests or injuries, but the clashes in Cairo left dozens of people bleeding in Tahrir Square, one of Cairo’s best-known settings, near the Egyptian Museum and a Ritz-Carlton Hotel under construction. Tourists gawked, and older protesters said they had never seen anything like the defiant demonstration.

Just blocks away, in sharp contrast, calm prevailed and traffic was light for Police Day, the national holiday the protesters co-opted for their campaign against the government.

Mohammed Ashraf, a 22-year-old law student, said the blood drenching his white sweater was that of a police officer. Like other protesters, he echoed the deep-seated frustrations of an enduring, repressive government that drove Tunisians to revolt: rampant corruption, injustice, high unemployment and the simple lack of dignity accorded them by the state.