Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Port Said on Friday to demand justice for protesters killed by Egyptian police, as a strike in the Suez Canal city entered its sixth day.

Protesters chanted against Islamist President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood, while slamming the interior ministry it accuses of having killed at least 40 people in clashes with police last month.

Egyptian parliamentary elections will be held in three stages, starting in April, a presidential source told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

"The elections will begin in April. They will be in three stages over three months," the source said, adding that President Mohamed Morsi would issue a decree outlining the details.

The U.N.'s human rights office on Tuesday took Egypt to task over a planned law on public protests, saying it would curb freedoms and breach international rules.

"Although freedom of assembly can be subject to certain restrictions, freedom should be considered the rule, and restrictions the exception," Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters.

Egypt's justice ministry on Tuesday referred former presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq to the Cairo criminal court on charges of corruption and squandering public funds, judicial sources told Agence France Presse.

Shafiq who has been living in the United Arab Emirates since his defeat in the election, faces arrest on his return to Egypt after he was put on an airport watch list.

A Cairo tribunal on Tuesday upheld death sentences passed on seven Egyptian Coptic Christians in absentia for their involvement in a movie that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammed, a judicial source said.

The accused, including the director of the movie that triggered outrage across the Muslim world when it surfaced last September, are currently living in the United States.

Egypt's state prosecutor ordered on Sunday an extremist Islamic preacher detained for questioning on suspicion of insulting religion after a complaint from a Christian activist, a judicial source said.

The preacher Ahmed Abdullah, known as Abu Islam, is already on trial for tearing up a bible during a protest outside the American embassy in Cairo in September over a short film made in the United States that insulted the Prophet Mohammed.

Thousands of Egyptians on Sunday closed down government offices and factories in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, demanding justice for dozens of people killed in clashes with police, witnesses said.

Demonstrators also shut down schools and banks and blocked a main railway route, but their protests did not impact traffic through the strategic Suez Canal, a canal official said.

Egypt will arm low ranking policemen with pistols, a security source said on Saturday, after they held protests demanding weapons and better work conditions amid a spike in violent crime.

Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim agreed to import 100,000 pistols, the source said, after almost a week of protests by policemen.

Egypt's interior ministry said on Saturday police arrested 60 people across the country during violent protests the night before targeting government and police buildings.

In Cairo, police arrested 30 people in clashes outside one of the presidential palaces, the ministry said in a statement.

Thousands of supporters of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi took to the street on Friday to denounce violence after weeks of bloody protests between police and anti-Morsi protesters.

The Islamist Construction and Development Party had called for the rally under the slogan "Together against violence", blaming the liberal-led opposition for unrest that has recently swept the country.