More than 800 people were killed in three weeks of nonviolent demonstrations this year.
The ministry said no officers accused of killing protesters remained in their old positions, but it declined to give their names, and it provided no explanation for the forced early retirement of nearly 500 other police generals and about 150 other senior officers.
But Mansour el-Essawy, the interior minister appointed after Mubarak’s ouster, called the moves “the biggest shake-up in the history of the police,’’ citing public demands “to get rid of all of the leadership that is accused of killing protesters’’ during the demonstrations in January and February. He said, without explanation, that 4,000 police officers were involved in the reorganization.
In Tahrir Square, where crowds have grown to rival the earlier demonstrations, protesters appeared to be unmoved. Human rights activists called the reorganization a modest first step toward a more thorough reform of the Interior Ministry, which remains widely despised for its practices of extrajudicial torture and detention under Mubarak.
Ahmed Ragheb, a human rights advocate who runs the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and helps lead a police reform project, called on the ministry to explain publicly how it intended to prevent further abuses. “We want them to suspend all of the officers who were accused of any human rights violations,’’ he said, and he faulted the ministry for failing to identify the officers removed from their posts.
Before the revolution, “we had a very bad experience with the ministry,’’ he said.
