1305 Egyptian blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy told the BBC World Service he did not think the incident in Cairo would spark unrest, but he thinks the likelihood of protests is growing: "Over the past four years the number of strikes and social unrest has been escalating and everybody is expecting an uprising. What exactly will be the trigger nobody knows. But we all feel it in the air."
In Egypt, where the leadership continues to rely on a decades-old emergency law that allows arrest without charge, there is a lot of room for free and critical speech, offering a safety valve for expression that did not exist in Tunisia, he said.