Updated at 5:36 p.m. ET
CAIRO Heavy gunfire rang out Friday throughout Cairo as tens of thousands of supporters of Egypt's ousted president clashed with armed vigilantes in the fiercest street battles to engulf the capital since the country's Arab Spring uprising. At least 64 people were killed in the fighting nationwide, including police officers.
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Carrying pistols and assault rifles, residents battled with protesters taking part in what the Muslim Brotherhood called a "Day of Rage," ignited by anger at security forces for clearing two sit-in demonstrations Wednesday in clashes that killed more than 600 people.
Egyptian State TV reported Friday that army troops had been deployed to guard "vital installations" around the country, and CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata reported that the interim government was taking the Brotherhood's threat very seriously.
CBS News' Alex Ortiz reports from Cairo that hundreds of demonstrators - supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi - were moving near the diplomatic neighborhood of Garden City in the city center where the U.S. and U.K. embassies are located.
As demonstrators were marching toward security forces' lines, Ortiz heard the police and the military use live ammunition. Shortly thereafter, at a nearby hospital, a stream of dead and wounded were ferried in on motorcycles.
Military helicopters circled overhead as residents furious with the Brotherhood protests pelted them with rocks and glass bottles. The two sides also fired on one another, sparking running street battles throughout the capital's residential neighborhoods.
There was little hope that an evening curfew would curb the violence as the Muslim Brotherhood called on supporters of the country's ousted Islamist president to stage daily protests.
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Unlike in past clashes between protesters and police, Friday's violence took an even darker turn with residents and possibly police in civilian clothing battling those participating in the Brotherhood-led marches. There were few police in uniform to be seen as neighborhood watchdogs and pro-Morsi protesters fired at one another for hours on a bridge that crosses over Cairo's Zamalek district, an upscale island neighborhood where many foreigners and ambassadors reside.
Across the country, at least 56 civilians were killed, along with eight police officers, security officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
The violence erupted shortly after midday weekly prayers when tens of thousands of Brotherhood supporters answered the group's call to protest across Egypt in defiance of a military-imposed state of emergency following the bloodshed earlier this week.
Armed civilians manned impromptu checkpoints throughout the capital, banning Brotherhood marches from approaching and frisking anyone wanting to pass through. At one checkpoint, residents barred ambulances and cars carrying wounded from Cairo's main battleground, Ramses Square, from reaching a hospital.
The scenes highlighted how dangerous the divisions in Egypt have become. At least nine police stations were attacked Friday, officials said. Egypt's police force was rocked by the country's 2011 uprising that ousted longtime leader Hosni Mubarak from power and has not fully recovered since.
On Thursday, the Interior Ministry said it had authorized the use of deadly force against anyone targeting police and state institutions. But the threat appeared not to intimidate protesters.
The Brotherhood-led marches in Cairo Friday headed toward Ramses Square, near the country's main train station. The area is near Tahrir Square, where the army put up barbed wire and deployed 30 tanks outside the Cairo Museum overlooking the square as a buffer between the protesters and a small anti-Brotherhood encampment in the square.
Several of the protesters were seen writing their names and relatives' phone numbers on one another's chests and undershirts in case they were to die in Friday's clashes.
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In Cairo Thursday, weeping relatives filled al-Imam mosque-turned-morgue near the gutted pro-Morsi protest camp in Nasr City and spilled into the courtyard and the streets.
Inside, the names of the dead were scribbled on white sheets covering the bodies, some of them charred, and a list with 265 names was plastered on the wall. Heat made the stench from the corpses almost unbearable as the ice brought in to chill the bodies melted and household fans offered little relief.
Many people complained that authorities were preventing them from obtaining permits to bury their dead, although the Brotherhood announced that several funerals had been held Thursday.
Ahmed Badir, who came from his Tampa, Fla., home to visit his family in Egypt, ended up having to identify his brother's body at the Imam mosque. But when he and his family members tried to take the slain man's body - which has a clear gunshot wound to the neck - they were told to sign papers that would have rewritten history.
"They said if you want to take the body now, you have to sign the documents, you have to agree that this was a natural death. That he died of natural causes, that's what it would say on the death certificate," an emotional Badir told D'Agata.
"My brother's number here at this makeshift morgue is 261. I know at least there's 261 bodies here, that are dead. Some of them are charred, some of them are children. When you see that, it becomes so overwhelming. I've never seen so much death," said Badir.
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On Friday, Tawfik Dessouki, a Brotherhood supporter, said he was ready to fight for "democracy" and against the military's ouster of Morsi.
"I am here for the blood of the people who died. We didn't have a revolution to go back to a police and military state again and to be killed by the state," he said during a march headed toward Ramses Square.
At least 12 people were killed near the square after police fired on protesters. Some appeared to be trying to attack a nearby police station, security officials said. Inside Al-Fath mosque near Ramses Square, where the Brotherhood urged its Cairo supporters to converge, blood-soaked bodies with bullets to the head and chest lay next to one another.
Associated Press photographers saw many of the dead inside the mosque-turned-morgue, which was also acting as a field hospital where the wounded were being wheeled in on wooden crates. One corpse had a name and phone number scribbled on the chest.
The upper floors of a commercial building towering over Ramses Square caught fire later in the day, with flames engulfing it for hours. It was not immediately clear what caused the fire at the building housing the Arab Contractors' construction company, but no injuries were reported.
Similar scenes played out in Egypt's second-largest city of Alexandria, where at least 10 people were killed in clashes between protesters and their rivals, according to a security official. Violence was also fierce in the province of Fayoum, just west of Cairo, where 11 people died during an attempt to storm the main security building there.
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