PARIS — Sweden’s prime minister on Friday led a chorus of European officials calling on Egyptian authorities to protect reporters covering pro-democracy demonstrations there, while a Swedish TV reporter was in serious condition after being stabbed in the back.

Speaking a day after the attack on reporter Bert Sundstrom of Swedish public broadcaster SVT, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt urged the Egyptian authorities to “respect the journalists.”

Reporters are “the eyes and the ears of the world at the moment,” Reinfeldt said at a European Union summit in Brussels.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based media watchdog, said Thursday that it had recorded 24 detentions of journalists, 21 assaults and five cases in which equipment was detained over a 24-hour period. Among those detained have been correspondents for the New York Times and Washington Post.

Foreign photographers reported attacks by supporters of President Hosni Mubarak near Tahrir Square in central Cairo, the focal point of increasingly violent mass demonstrations demanding the Egyptian leader step down after 30 years in power.