Egypt Protests Boosted Hero's Release
CAIRO - Egyptian protesters are rallying around a recently released Google Inc. executive as they try to maintain the momentum of a mass protest calling for President Hosni Mubarak's ouster.
Activists also called for 1 million people to fill the central Tahrir Square on Tuesday. Live video from the square showed a larger crowd than the previous day, and accounts from Cairo suggested it would swell much more over the course of the day.
Loud chants could be heard rising from the crowd, calling for an immediate end to Mubarak's rule.
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The protests already have brought the most sweeping changes since Mubarak took power nearly 30 years ago, but activists are insisting Mubarak step down immediately.
Some 120,000 have signed a Facebook page calling Google marketing manager Wael Ghonim to be their leader, and they expect him to appear in the square Tuesday afternoon, a day after he was released from detention. Ghonim has said he was the administrator of a Facebook page used to organize Egypt's unprecedented pro-democracy uprising.
A source close to Ghonim tells CBS News the Google executive has decided not to give any interviews to Western media, fearing such a dialogue could fuel government claims that outside forces were behind the country's uprising. The source confirmed that Ghonim was on his way to Tahrir on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in its latest effort to defuse public anger and the protests, Mubarak's regime set up a committee Tuesday to recommend constitutional changes that would relax presidential eligibility rules and impose term limits.
Mubarak's decrees were announced on state television by Vice President Omar Suleiman, who also said that Mubarak had decreed the creation of a separate committee to monitor the implementation of all proposed reforms. The two committees would start working immediately, but Suleiman did not give details about who would sit on the panels or how they would be chosen.
The government has promised several concessions since an uprising began two weeks ago but so far they have fallen short of protesters' demands that Mubarak step down immediately instead of staying on through September elections. Tuesday's decision was the first concrete step taken by the longtime authoritarian ruler to implement promised reforms.
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Mubarak also ordered a probe into clashes last week between the protesters and supporters of the president. The committee would refer its findings to the attorney-general, Suleiman said.
"The youth of Egypt deserve national appreciation," he quoted the president as saying. "They should not be detained, harassed or denied their freedom of expression."
Thousands of protesters, meanwhile, remained camped out in the central Tahrir Square, many hoping for the appearance by Ghonim, who has emerged as a rallying point after he was released Monday after 12 days in custody.
"We have proven that we are the strongest party, and we will achieve our demands," Ghonim, who insists he's no hero, told Al Arabiya television after his release on Monday.
CBS News' Khaled Wassef reports that more than 120,000 people have joined a Facebook group nominating Ghonim to be their spokesman. Many demonstrators reject a group of officially sanctioned and traditional Egyptian opposition groups that have been negotiating with the government on their behalf in recent days.
Ghonim attempted to remain humble, reports CBS News correspondent Terry McCarthy.
"I am not a hero," he told an Arabic television crew. "I am a very ordinary person. The heroes are the ones in the street."
His mother was less modest. "I want to put a sign on my chest that reads, I'm the mother of a hero," she said proudly after his release.
Tuesday's announcements came two days after Suleiman met for the first time with representatives of opposition groups, including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood - the country's largest and best organized opposition group - to debate a way out of the ongoing political crisis.
The fundamentalist Islamic group issued a statement before Suleiman's announcement Tuesday calling the reforms proposed so far as "partial" and insisting that Mubarak must go to ease what it called the anger felt by Egyptians who face widespread poverty and government repression.
The Brotherhood also accused pro-Mubarak thugs of detaining protesters, including Brotherhood supporters, and handing them over to the army's military police who torture them.
"We call on the military, which we love and respect, to refrain from these malicious acts," said the statement.
The protesters have said they would not enter negotiations with the regime before Mubarak's departure. Mubarak insists that he intends to serve the remainder of his current, six-year term, which expires in September, and that he would die in Egypt, thus rejecting any suggestion that he should leave the country.
The president went on with official business Tuesday, receiving the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates. The official Middle East News Agency said Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan delivered a message from the UAE's president but gave no further details.