Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former chief of the United Nations nuclear agency, said Wednesday that he intended to run for president, although he set conditions under which he would pursue the office vacated last month by Egypt’s longtime leader, Hosni Mubarak.
“When the door for presidential nominations opens, I intend to nominate myself,” Mr. ElBaradei said on a talk show broadcast live by the Egyptian satellite channel ON TV.
The announcement came amid a growing sense of uncertainty as Egypt begins to chart its future after decades of autocratic rule and as violence has begun to escalate.
On Tuesday night into early Wednesday, 13 people were killed and 140 wounded in fighting between Muslims and Christians in the suburbs of Cairo, the Health Ministry said. The clashes, which broke out during a protest by several hundred Christians over the burning last week of a church in the village of Soul, were a significant departure from the sense of solidarity that had prevailed among people of different backgrounds throughout the weeks of protests that led to Mr. Mubarak’s resignation.
The attack against the church was said to result from village tensions surrounding a love affair between a Muslim woman and a Christian man.
The journalists were seized at a checkpoint in western Libya while trying to enter the city of Zawiyah. The pair were then held, beaten and given mock executions in the most extreme case of the Gaddafi regime's harassment of international journalists.
Feras Killani, a journalist of Palestinian-Syrian origin for the BBC Arabic service, and Chris Cobb-Smith, a British national, made public their fate at the hands of soldiers and militia after flying out of the country on Wednesday night.
Libya, normally one of the most closed countries in the Middle East to journalists, has invited in scores in the past ten days in a bid to demonstrate that television reports of the crisis in the country are exaggerated. They have been handed letters saying they can report freely.
But after a series of miscalculations, once taking reporters to Zawiyah, a town still in rebel hands, officials have tightened movements, detaining scores at checkpoints around the capital, Tripoli, including The Daily Telegraph's correspondent twice.
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