CAIRO, Apr. 19 (Aswat Masriya) - Egypt's interior minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar referred a low-ranking police officer accused of killing a tea vendor and injuring two more, to public prosecution on Tuesday.

The low-ranking officer, Zeinhum Abdel Razek shot and killed a tea vendor, and injured two more people, early Tuesday morning after a quarrel over his refusal to pay for the tea.

The incident took place in Rehab, a neighbourhood in the outskirts of Cairo.

The interior ministry released a statement shortly afterwards stating that the policeman fired the shot after a stand-off between him and the vendor over the price of a drink.

Citing a witness, Reuters reported that a crowd gathered and overturned a police vehicle and beating up another policeman at the scene of the incident.  

Several cases of police violence against civilians have been reported over the past months.

In an incident that dates back to Feb. 18, a driver was shot dead after a dispute between him and the policeman over the cost of loading goods.

The incident has sparked public anger at the police and hundreds took to protest in Cairo's streets after the killing, in an expression of anger that has become rare in the past few years. 

In January, a doctor at the Matariya Teaching Hospital recounted in a video published by Egyptian news portal Mobtada the details of his assault by two low-ranking policemen at the hospital after he told one of them that his injury was superficial.

The incident prompted thousands of doctors to rally in front of the doctors’ syndicate in February demanding to hold those responsible for the assault accountable

While human rights workers, activists, and even non-politicised civilians having been increasingly calling out police brutality over the past few months, the interior ministry maintains that these are "isolated incidents" that do not reflect on the entire ministry. 

“This condition of anger [towards police] will continue to exist,” Adel Ramadan, a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights previously told Aswat Masriya “anger will remain as long as the [interior ministry] keeps asserting its domination.”

Police brutality was one of the triggers of the Jan. 25, 2011 uprising, sparked by protests on Police Day in Egypt aimed to draw attention to the police's use of excessive, at times fatal, force.