CAIRO: Egyptian police yesterday arrested Mohamed Ali Bishr, one of the few Muslim Brotherhood leaders to escape jail after last year’s overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, in the latest sign of a crackdown on political dissent.
Bishr, a veteran politician who served as a cabinet minister under Mursi, was accused of calling for mass protests on November 28, state media said.
Since the army toppled Mursi in July 2013, Egypt has banned the Brotherhood, its oldest Islamist movement, labelled it a terrorist organisation and rounded up thousands of its members.
With much of the leadership, including Mursi, in jail, Bishr had played a key role in keeping the group’s activities alive underground. He was also involved in a pressure group that had pushed for Mursi’s reinstatement and was banned last month.
The group, the National Coalition to Support Legitimacy and Reject the Coup, condemned Bishr’s arrest.
“We reject the continuation of rabid attacks against components of the coalition and its members... and against the sons and daughters of the student protest movement,” the group said on its Facebook page.
The outlawed Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Brotherhood, condemned the arrest and said Bishr had served seven years in jail from 1999-2002 and from 2006-2010.
Once among Egypt’s best-organised political movements, the Brotherhood had won the first parliamentary and presidential elections after the 2011 revolution that toppled veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak.REUTERS
CAIRO: A bomb wounded five policemen near a Cairo university yesterday and four people were hurt in a panicked crush after an explosion at a train station in the Egyptian capital, security officials said.
The five policemen, including two officers, were hurt when a bomb exploded at a small post near Helwan University in southern Cairo, security officials said. But the interior ministry said assailants in a speeding car threw a bomb at the policemen near the university, wounding four officers and a conscript.
Meanwhile, four people were injured in a stampede at the capital’s Ramses station after a blast inside a compartment of a train that pulled in from the Nile Delta, security officials said, adding that the blast was caused by a “sound bomb.”AFP
