LI student escapes Egypt

When Egypt Air flight 985 finally arrived at Kennedy Airport Wednesday from Cairo, Alexandra Woodhouse's father saw her first.

"Alex," he shouted as he ran to her and grabbed her.

They had spoken by phone just days earlier, when she called home to Great Neck on a scratchy landline to say there was gunfire and tear gas outside her Cairo apartment. "Dad, I'm really scared," the 21-year-old college student said.

"Can you get me out?" she asked, and Colin Woodhouse said he grew frantic because he didn't know if he could.

He called airlines and finally found one on Egypt Air. So when she stepped off the plane, parents and daughter hugged and kissed. "Thank God," said her mother, Latifa Woodhouse, crying.

"I'm so glad to be home," Alexandra said, as she wept, too.

A few yards away, Dr. Ihab Ibrahim, 40, of Shoreham, stood with his parents, Ezzat and Aida Ibrahim, retirees from Forest Hills who arrived home from what was to have been a monthlong vacation in their native Egypt.

On a day when civil unrest lurched into violence in parts of Cairo, Ezzat Ibrahim sounded dazed. "It's a terrifying feeling," he said. "I can't put it into words. I don't know how they will solve this. I have no idea."

The Ibrahims were in Alexandria when the protests began and were almost stranded there, after the Egyptian government shut down most trains and public transportation. They couldn't get through to the embassy; at first, neither could their son, who said he called an emergency line only to reach a recording. Eventually, he received an e-mail telling him to have his parents get to the Cairo airport by 8 a.m. Monday. Curfews made that impossible, so the Ibrahims hired a driver who took them past military checkpoints and delivered them to the airport a day later.

Alexandra Woodhouse's trip was hardly easier. She was in Cairo on an internship with the United Nations. UN security warned her and her roommates not to leave their apartment; a U.S. embassy official told her to walk or get a cab to the airport.

She and her roommates hitched a ride with two busloads of students from American University in Cairo.

The buses skirted Tahir Square, where she'd visited last week. It had been a thrill to be on history's edge: "These people are fighting for freedom, and I'm witnessing it," she said.

But by Monday the thrill was gone. She saw soldiers with bayonets on their rifles, security personnel with helmets and riot shields. She was scared for herself and for the Egyptian friends she was leaving.

"I hope they get what they rightfully deserve," she said. "They're fighting for basic rights."