Muscat: The stand-off at the Globe Roundabout in Sohar continued yesterday till late evening much after the reported deadline for the protesters to leave the main city junction expired at 6pm.
A message circulated through SMS earlier in the day had urged protesters to end their protests at the centre of city, which is also known as the Sohar Roundabout.
"We came to know the alert has been raised from orange to red," Adil Taiseer, a citizen of Sohar, told Gulf News. Adil is among some of the elderly Sohar citizens trying to make sense to the young protesters and have even asked residents to report to them any sabotage attempts in the city.
The number of protesters went down drastically on the sixth day yesterday as barely 200 of them had gathered in the evening just below the huge globe placed at the centre of the roundabout. The last time when police fired tear gas shells on Monday evening, there were nearly 2,000 protesters at the venue.
‘All peaceful'
"It is all peaceful and some people could be seen talking in a group but there are no megaphones and no leaders speaking to the protesters like the past three days," a long-time Oman expatriate told Gulf News on the condition of not naming him.
"The army vehicles have gone back inside the police station," he said.
"We did try to make the protesters understand that it would be prudent to leave the roundabout so that trouble makers could be separated from the genuine peaceful protesters," Adil pointed out.
"The Sohar Port is running fine and was never closed during this protests," Annica Sigevall, Head of Corporate Communication at Sohar Industrial Port Company, told Gulf News yesterday. The Sohar Citizen Committee began circulating mobile phone numbers of their core members so that people can contact them in case of any emergency or even arson attempts. While the protesters are holding fort at the Globe Roundabout, the police are inside the station close to the place but did not come out.
They have on two-three occasions fired tear gas shells from inside the police station when miscreants tried to besiege the station or set objects on fire outside the station. There have been no attempts of violence by the protesters for the last 48 hours.
In Muscat a 50-odd protesters, who began the Green March protests in January, continued their sit-in outside the Majlis Ashura building in Seeb district.
There have been reports of small protests in different parts of the country including, Sur, Yankul, Khaboura and Ibra. The trouble began on Saturday after 200 people who were taken in the middle of the night to Sumayil prison.
Rubber bullets
People gathering in the front of the police station that night demanding their release were met with tear gas and rubber bullets resulting in two deaths. The following day the 200 people were released. However, the protesters say they have a list of demands and will continue to sit in Globe Roundabout until their demands are met.
Meanwhile, a joint government-private sector initiative has been launched in earnest to implement Sultan Qaboos Bin Saeed's order to create 50,000 jobs for Omani citizens.
