Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Ben

Henderson.

It's August 2013 and we're in Rabar al-Adawiyah Square in Egypt's capital, Cairo.

Following a military coup, supporters of the deposed president, Muhammad Morsi, were furious.

They protested by occupying the square in the city centre.

On the 14th of August, the army arrived.

It was one of the bloodiest days in the country's modern history.

That was just after first light when the military moved in.

And not long after that, when the first shots were fired, the hours that followed saw an

orgy of violence in the heart of Cairo.

I remember a very nice woman called Asme Sakr.

So her husband, he has a bullet in his leg, so she went to the medical centre inside Rabar

to see her husband.

And once she forget that she should be sitting down, she stand up behind an open window.

And less than one minute, the shooter from the army targeted her and her hijab was white

in one second, turned to red and both of them killed.

This is Samir El Balki, a master's student and political activist.

He was in Rabar Square that day.

Even so that of Bejus have been written to describe what happened in the masquerade, they

will not cover what happened and the impact of so that of families.

For three decades, Egypt was ruled by Hosni Mubarak, an authoritarian leader.

Samir was politically engaged ever since his student days in the 1990s.

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