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A Kuwaiti anti-riot police arrests an Egyptian
worker after police came under renewed attack
following overnight riots. |
KUWAIT CITY (AFP) - Kuwaiti police fired tear-gas and shots in the air to quell rioting by Egyptian workers that left 100 people hospitalized and six police cars in flames, witnesses and hospital sources said Sunday.
The unrest broke out late Saturday after an Egyptian smashed a plate in a grocery shop in Kheitan, a poor district 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Kuwait City, and refused to pay the Bangladeshi shopkeeper for the breakage.
When police arrived to arrest the Egyptian, his compatriots ransacked the shop to protest his innocence and heavy-handed detention.
An AFP photographer at the scene said the disturbance spiraled out of control, and Kuwaiti Special Forces were mobilized to disperse a crowd of some 4,000 Egyptians.
The Egyptians pelted the police, looted houses and torched cars, including six police patrol vehicles. The security forces responded by firing shots in the air and tear-gas into the crowd.
Egypt's ambassador to Kuwait arrived under heavy police guard to calm the crowd, but failed amid heckling from the rioters, who were largely unskilled and unemployed laborers from Upper Egypt.
Officials at the local hospital said they treated around 100 people through the night, including one photographer with Al-Rai Al-Aam newspaper who was seriously hurt and several other journalists.
Most of those injured were treated for inhaling tear-gas in what the English-language newspaper Arab Times dubbed the "most serious rioting in Kuwait`s history." Both the Egyptian embassy and Kuwait's interior ministry were unavailable for comment on Sunday, but witnesses said the atmosphere in Kheitan remained tense.
Heavily-armed police and army patrols maintained a high profile.
Some 274,000 Egyptians work in Kuwait, many in unskilled laboring jobs. Their unemployment rate runs high as Kuwaiti sponsors often fail to find them work on their arrival in the oil-rich emirate.
