Some of the protesters were arrested while others were chased away.
"A number of girls attending the protest were dragged along the ground [by police]," one protester told Al-Masry Al-Youm. "Twelve colleagues were arrested and put into an armored vehicle. Security forces did not warn us in advance, but rather charged at us suddenly."
The clashes brought traffic on Qasr al-Aini Street to a halt.
Two photojournalists were arrested while covering the protest but were later released. One of them, a reporter from Sada el-Balad news website, had his camera smashed by the police officers, according to Journalists Against Torture’s facebook page.
"An agreement was reached last week to set a date for a meeting with a Cabinet official,” one protester told Al-Masry Al-Youm, noting that similar pledges by the previous government were not honored, as he put it. The student said his demonstrating colleagues are mulling escalation through sit-ins as well as hunger strikes.
An earlier protest by the same students on September 17 was also broken up violently.
Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics said in a report this month that the country’s jobless rate slightly declined to 12.7 percent in the second quarter of 2015, from 12.8 percent in the first quarter and below the 13.3 percent recorded for the same period last year.
