File photo shows Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie speaking during a press conference at the party's headquarters in Cairo.
CAIRO: Egypt issued a warrant yesterday for the arrest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme leader Mohammed Badie in connection with deadly violence in Cairo, stoking Islamist anger over the army’s ouster of president Mohammed Mursi.
Badie and other senior Brotherhood leaders are wanted on suspicion of inciting Monday’s violence outside the Republican Guard headquarters where Mursi supporters were demanding his reinstatement, judicial sources said. Mursi is currently being held in a “safe place, for his safety,” foreign ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty told reporters, adding: “He is not charged with anything up till now,” he said.
The Islamist president’s overthrow by the military last week, after nationwide protests demanding his resignation, has plunged Egypt into a vortex of violence. More than 50 people died in Monday’s violence, most of them Mursi supporters.
The Brotherhood says troops and police “massacred” its activists as they were performing dawn prayers, with women and children among the dead. The army said it was responding to an attack by “armed terrorists”. According to the health ministry, 53 people died and 480 were wounded in Monday’s clashes. The public prosecutor pressed charges against 200 of the 650 people it detained during the violence, judicial sources said.
The warrant for Badie’s arrest was likely to make it harder for the interim civilian administration to be formed by prime minister-designate Hazem Al Beblawi to reach out to the Islamists.
The liberal former finance minister, who began talks on his cabinet line-up yesterday, is ready to offer the Brotherhood ministerial posts, the state-run Mena news agency quoted an aide as saying. But the Islamists spurned the overture. “We do not deal with putschists. We reject all that comes from this coup,” Brotherhood spokesman Tareq Al Mursi said.
Interim president Adly Mansour has set a timetable for elections by early next year, while appointing Beblawi as premier and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei as vice president for foreign affairs.
Human rights groups condemned the use of “excessive” force against Brotherhood supporters on Monday, and called for an independent investigation. The latest violence struck overnight in the Sinai Peninsula, where militants hit a police garrison with mortars and heavy machineguns, security officials said. Two people were also killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on an army checkpoint, medics said.
The US, which provides $1.5bn in mainly military aid to Egypt, said it was “cautiously encouraged” by the timetable proposed for a new presidential election. Kuwait pledged $4bn in assistance to Egypt, bringing the combined total pledged by Gulf states since the coup to $12bn. AFP
