The Telegraph reports: Egypt’s military-backed regime is attempting to win hearts and minds by setting up memorial sculptures at sites of protests where its army and police gunned down demonstrators.

Residents and passers-by in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, made famous the world over by the 2011 revolution, have watched agog and puzzled in recent days as a circular stone creation has begun to take shape in the grass-covered central roundabout.

On Sunday, the authorities announced it would be unveiled on the eve of Tuesday’s anniversary of the so-called Mohammed Mahmoud massacre, several days of protests in 2011 when scores of demonstrators against the then interim Supreme Council of the Armed Forces were shot dead on the street of that name that leads away from the Square.

In addition, several more lost eyes to a central security force marksman who was later convicted of deliberately targeting them with birdshot.

The memorial is the second in a sequence. Earlier this month, another sculpture consisting of two angular arms, representing the police and army, protecting a silver orb, representing the people, was completed in the square in front of Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque, where the army killed more than 600 Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators in August. [Continue reading…]