A CNN broadcast in Cairo was cut short Friday evening when a member of the Egyptian military abruptly seized the crew's camera.
Ben Wedemann, a senior international correspondent for the network, was reporting shortly after 11 p.m., local time, from Cairo's 6th October Bridge, where clashes earlier in the day left multiple people dead and dozens more injured.
Wedeman's report began:
We are right off of Tahrir Square, where four armored personnel carriers have been deployed with around 100 soldiers from the Egyptian army to reestablish order here. The [inaudible] seems to have come to an end, and I'm told, we're told—
At that point, a uniformed member of the Egyptian military approached from behind Wedeman, pointing his finger and shouting for the camera, which he subsequently grabbed. "They're trying to take away our camera," Wedeman commented from offscreen, as the officer who confiscated it had turned the lens toward the ground. After several more hectic seconds, the broadcast cut out.
In the following confusion, rumors circulated on Twitter that Wedeman had been arrested. However, as Wedeman himself would later explain on Twitter, the crew was only briefly stopped by the military.
Mitra Mobasherat, a supervising editor on CNN's international desk, later elaborated:
More than a dozen people were killed in clashes around Egypt on Friday, two days after the military deposed former President Mohammed Morsi, who had faced increasingly widespread pressure to step down.
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