EGYPT: Eight Shots

Trying to rally enthusiasm for the Suez settlement, Egypt’s young Strongman Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser faced a quarter million of his people one night last week in Alexandria’s Manshiya Square. On that very spot, he said dramatically, as a schoolboy in 1930 he took part in his first anti-British demonstration, first saw authorities shoot down fellow Egyptians. “But I am alive,” he cried, “participating in the freeing of my country.”

Gunfire in the Square. A round-faced shock-haired man rose 40 ft. away, pointed a pistol at Nasser and began firing carefully and evenly. Eight shots rang out, and resounded all over Egypt by radio. A glass lamp shattered overhead and showered shards of glass; the left breast of Nasser’s uniform grew dark with a stain that looked like blood, but still Nasser stood, thrusting aside friendly hands that tried to pull him down out of danger. Then he stepped back to the microphone and in a hoarse voice, wild and throbbing, screamed again and again: “Oh, free men, let everybody stay in his place.” Through the babble of panic rising around him, he bellowed: “My blood is for you. My life is for you.” With a roar the crowd seized and pummeled the would-be assassin.

An hour later Gamal Abdel Nasser sat unhurt in the Alexandria lawyers’ club sipping a lemonade, once more apparently his old, softspoken, self-possessed self. The stain on his tunic turned out to be not blood but a fountain pen leak. The gunman cowered in jail and under police persuasion admitted he was Mahmoud

Abdul Latif, a 32-year-old Cairo tinsmith, a Moslem Brother since 1938. Two months ago a secret Brotherhood group had picked him to kill Nasser. His confession was all the regime was waiting for; at last the cops felt free to go after the powerful Moslem Brotherhood, the last legal opposition to Nasser.

Flame at Headquarters. In Cairo, a mob surged through narrow, shabby back streets to the Ikhwan (Brotherhood) headquarters and set it afire. By the time the firemen could get through the mob, the Ikhwan headquarters—once the center of Egypt’s secret government which had made, broken, and even killed Premiers—was a gutted ruin. Four days later, police arrested the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Ahmed Hassan el Hodeiby.

Until the shooting, the people had never, given Gamal Abdel Nasser the affection they gave his pipe-smoking predecessor, General Naguib. Now, as Nasser’s train passed through the delta cities, returning to Cairo, huge crowds spontaneously came out to cheer him. At the Cairo railway station, 100,000 people surged against police lines crying, “God bless Gamal.” Besieged by admirers reaching out to embrace him, the Premier needed two hours to make what was ordinarily a ten-minute drive to his office. Eight wild shots had served him well.