At least 25 killed in football match stampede in Cairo

#zamalek #egypt #ENPPI #whiteknights It was a major football match in Egypt between Egyptian Premier League clubs Zamalek and ENPPI at the Air Defense Stadium east of Cairo in which at least 25 people died in a combination of stampede and clashes with the police.
Reports indicate that violence preceded the game because fans of Zamalek tried to enter the stadium without tickets and that resulted in clashes as revealed in news.sky.com dated 9 February 2015.
However there appears to be a controversy on this aspect because a group of Zamalek fans known as the White Knights have posted on Facebook that violence began since the authorities only had opened one narrow, barbed-wire door to let them in. Subsequently, the group posted pictures and the names of 22 people who were killed claiming them to be fans – they said that a police car was set on fire and the police were shooting birdshot and tear gas and the people fled into the desert to escape.
The match was not abandoned but continued in spite the trouble and that added fuel to the already tense situation. It seems the Interior Ministry had plans to allow only 10,000 fans into the ground even though the stadium had a capacity of approximately 30,000.
Incidentally, the deadliest football riot in Egyptian history took place three years ago during a match between Port Said's al Masry and Cairo's al Ahly - 74 people, most of them al Ahly fans, died in the violence.