Egyptian candidate’s headquarters attacked

Protesters set fire to the headquarters of Egypt’s presidential candidate and ex-premier Ahmad Shafiq after the election committee said he made it into a run off vote with an Islamist rival.The assailants set fire to an annex of Shafiq’s headquarters in Cairo hours after election officials announced that the holdover from Hosni Mubarak’s ousted regime will face the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi in the second-round election.A police official said eight suspects were arrested near the headquarters, a villa in the middle class Dokki neighbourhood.Some of the protesters returned to the iconic Tahrir Square and threw campaign leaflets taken from Shafiq’s headquarters on to the street. Many appeared to be supporters of an unsuccessful leftwing candidate and opposed both Shafiq and Mursi.There were no immediate reports of injuries at the headquarters and firefighters said the blaze was quickly put under control.“We were inside when they attacked us,” one member of Shafiq’s campaign staff said, without identifying himself. “They set fire to the garage that had general Shafiq’s campaign literature.”ResultsEarlier around 1,000 protesters had gathered in Tahrir Square to protest Shafiq’s presence on the runoff ballot.“Shafiq will be president when I’m dead,” read one poster on a car parked in the square, the hub of the nationwide uprising that ousted president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.