On the evening of 5 March 2011, thousands of angry demonstrators stormed the headquarters of the once-feared state security (internal intelligence) apparatus in Nasr City — a sprawling neighbourhood in eastern Cairo — seizing thousands of what was believed to be files and documents, including video and cassette recordings.
This invasion was the first episode in a long series of appropriations of documents and files by demonstrators from State Security offices across Egypt.
Standing at the heart of these seizures were the junior members of the Muslim Brotherhood— an educational-turned-charity organisation formed in 1928. The group had its long-awaited moment of political empowerment in 2011 after the downfall of the Hosni Mubarak autocracy, almost a month before the attacks on the State Security building in Nasr City.
Outside the building, a veteran judge tried to convince the angry demonstrators to back off.
"You'll gain nothing by ransacking this building," said the judge, standing on top of an Egyptian army M1A1 tank.
"Do you want us to go home?" one of the demonstrators asked the judge angrily. "No, we won't do this."
The judge — who took part in the anti-Hosni Mubarak uprising standing shoulder to shoulder with protests in Tahrir Square — had to pull back. All other non-Islamist demonstrators did the same, leaving the Islamists, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, outside and inside the State Security building.
Thirty-seven days prior, thousands of Islamist inmates, including Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood senior official who would win Egypt's presidential election almost a year and a half later, broke out of their jail cells across Egypt.
The 25 January revolution of 2011, which put an end to Hosni Mubarak's three-decade rule of Egypt, opened the door for the political empowerment of the nation's Islamists — particularly the Muslim Brotherhood — following decades of state repression.
The revolution, which started as a peaceful movement by tens of thousands of Egyptian youth against Mubarak's regime, was hijacked by Islamists to settle old scores with state authorities — particularly the police.
Nowhere is this more clear than the date chosen for the anti-Mubarak mass protest: 25 January, which is Police Day in Egypt. This sent a clear message about who had become in charge.
The aftermath of the protests, the toppling of Mubarak, the takeover of the Muslim Brotherhood through popular elections, and then the subsequent military coup sometime later, left a lasting impact on Egypt and the broader region.
Costly upheavals
On the 13th anniversary of this revolution, Egypt has nothing to celebrate. The most populous Arab country continues to suffer the political, economic and security aftershocks of this seminal development.
The anti-Mubarak protests and attacks against state and police facilities in the early days of the uprising collapsed the nation's security system, including the police force.
This devastated Egypt's economy, having stopped industrial production across the nation, scared tourists away and brought the flow of foreign investments to a screeching halt.
Egyptian authorities estimate losses to the national economy from these developments in the hundreds of billions of dollars, including lost economic opportunities.
The disintegration of Egypt's security system spawned a terrifying number of terrorist groups, including in the Sinai, where one of the groups morphed into a branch of the Islamic State (IS) in 2014. It took ten years to eradicate the group, which cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
Read more: IS spectre disappears from Sinai for first time in decade
