Egypt protesters encircle presidential palace

CAIRO: Tens of thousands of Egyptian demonstrators encircled the presidential palace Tuesday after riot police failed to keep them at bay with tear gas, in a growing crisis over President Mohamed Morsi's decree widening his powers.

The protesters cut through barbed wire a few hundred metres (yards) from the palace, prompting police to fire the tear gas before retreating and allowing demonstrators to reach the palace walls, AFP correspondents said.

Morsi himself was not in the palace, a presidential aide told AFP. A security official said "the president of the republic left the Itihadiya palace on schedule after official meetings".

A video posted online by the Egyptian news network Rassd showed a convoy leaving the palace through a riot police cordon as protesters chanted "coward" and "leave".

In Tahrir Square, where other protesters had rallied, the spokesman for an alliance of opposition groups, the National Rescue Front, announced a sit-in outside the palace and called for similar actions across the country.

Demonstrators, many from liberal and leftist movements, banged on lamp posts and chanted "leave" in a thunderous show of force.

Most left later in the night, leaving behind roughly two thousand protesters as some set up about a dozen tents for the night outside the palace walls, which had been covered in anti-Morsi graffiti.

In the central province of Minya, clashes flared between opponents and supporters of Morsi outside the headquarters of his Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Police fired tear gas at the crowd after Morsi opponents tore down a picture of the president, prompting skirmishes with his supporters.

Anti-Morsi protests also erupted in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and the central province of Sohag, with the spreading unrest prompting US appeals for restraint.

"We would simply urge that protesters express their views peacefully and that they be given the environment... to protest peacefully," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

Tuesday's protests are the latest in a string of actions opposed to Morsi's November 22 decree, which expanded his powers and enabled him to put to a mid-December referendum a draft constitution drawn up by an Islamist-dominated panel and rejected by liberals, leftists and Christians.

Outside the palace, the demonstrators waved Egyptian flags, chanting for the regime's downfall and denouncing the Brotherhood for having "sold the revolution" that toppled longtime leader Hosni Mubarak last year.