Mohammed El-Baradei, a Nobel peace laureate and the country's top pro-democracy advocate, was returning to the country and declared he was ready to lead the protests. The country's largest opposition group _ the Muslim Brotherhood - also threw its support behind the demonstrations.
Rioting and protests erupted for a third straight day and social networking sites were abuzz with talk that Friday's rallies could be some of the biggest so far calling for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.
Safwat El-Sherif, secretary-general of the National Democratic Party and a longtime confidant of Mubarak, was dismissive of the protesters at the first news conference by a senior ruling party figure since the protests began.
"We are confident of our ability to listen. The NDP is ready for a dialogue with the public, youth and legal parties," he said. "But democracy has its rules and process. The minority does not force its will on the majority."
The 82-year-old Mubarak has not been seen in public or heard from since the protests began Tuesday with tens of thousands marching in Cairo and a string of other cities.
Scores of protesters gathered in Cairo and other cities Thursday. In the eastern city of Suez demonstrators torched a police post early Thursday in response to the killing of three protesters earlier in the week. Police fled the post before the protesters burned it using petrol bombs.
On Wednesday evening, people in Suez had set a government building and another police post on fire and tried to burn down a local office of NDP. Those fires were all put out before they engulfed the buildings but dozens more protesters gathered in front of the partially burned police post later on Thursday morning.
In Ismailia, hundreds of protesters clashed with police who used tear gas and batons to disperse them.
Scores of men protested outside the downtown Cairo offices of Egypt's lawyers' union.
There were two other small, peaceful protests by lawyers in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta town of Toukh, north of Cairo. In the northern Sinai area of Sheikh Zuweid, clashes between several hundred Bedouins and police left a 17-year-old man dead.
Interior Minister Habib El-Adli, whose resignation is being demanded by the protesters, has dismissed the demonstrations. "Egypt's system is not marginal or frail. We are a big state, with an administration with popular support. The millions will decide the future of this nation, not by demonstrators even if they numbered in the thousands," he told Kuwait's Al-Rai newspaper.
