So far, immigration authorities have not moved to detain student protesters.
The secret police acted swiftly, detaining student leaders, and even some opposition politicians, for short amounts of time.
In Hama, soldiers walking through the streets of Arbaeen and other neighborhoods that had protested burst into schools to detain students, hauled people out of their homes — shooting some who resisted — and set numerous houses on fire, according to the activist organization Avaaz.
In May, people beat up a middle school principal who was accused of helping authorities detain students wearing scarves.
In the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, prosecutors have detained a student, Sherif Gaber, since last fall on allegations that he started a Facebook page for atheists.
Among those detained were students, journalists, activists and human rights lawyers.
Local police reportedly detained the students in the nearby city of Iguala, then turned them over to a drug gang that apparently killed them and incinerated their remains.
Other news agencies have reported in recent days that some or all of the foreigners detained were students studying Arabic at one or more of the language institutes in Sana, the Yemeni capital.
"Scores of uniformed municipal police and a handful of masked men dressed in black shot and killed six people, wounded more than twenty, and rounded up and detained forty-three students in a series of attacks carried out at multiple points and lasting more than three hours," Gibler wrote to me in an e-mail.
