CAIRO: A leader of the Muslim Brotherhood vowed that the movement would keep up protests after Egypt’s military-installed government designated it a “terrorist” group yesterday.
“The protests will continue, certainly,” Ibrahim Munir, a member of the group’s top guidance council who is in exile in London, said, adding the government’s decision was “illegitimate”.
“This is an attempt to frame the Brotherhood,” Munir said of the decision, taken a day after a suicide bombing of a police headquarters in the city of Mansoura killed 16 people, in an attack claimed by an Al Qaeda-inspired militant group.
The military-backed government intensified its crackdown on the Brotherhood, formally listing the group as a terrorist organisation after accusing it of carrying out a suicide bomb attack. The Brotherhood condemned the attack on Tuesday in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura, north of Cairo. Earlier in the day, a Sinai-based militant group, Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis had claimed responsibility for the attack that wounded some 140 people.
The move gives the authorities the power to charge any member of deposed President Mohamed Mursi’s movement with belonging to a terrorist group, as well as anyone who finances the group or promotes it “verbally, or in writing”.
An Al Qaeda-inspired group based in Egypt’s Sinai yesterday claimed a suicide car bombing of a police headquarters north of Cairo that killed 15 people, the deadliest such attack since Mohamed Mursi’s overthrow.
The brazen assault underscored the military’s challenge to contain Sinai militants who have killed more than 100 soldiers and policemen in a wave of attacks since the army ousted Islamist president Mursi on July 3.
“Your brothers in Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, with the grace of God, were able to target the Daqhaleya police headquarters,” the group said of Tuesday’s attack, in a statement posted on Islamist forums. Ansar Beit Al Maqdis said the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber identified as “Abu Maryam”.
Authorities say there are links between the Sinai jihadists and Mursi’s more moderate Muslim Brotherhood movement, but have offered no proof.
Mursi and top Brotherhood leaders, imprisoned in a crackdown following his overthrow, are charged with colluding with militant groups to launch attacks in the country.
Ansar Beit Al Maqdis, whose name in English means “Partisans of Jerusalem”, had previously claimed credit for bombings in Sinai and the attempted assassination by a suicide car bomber of interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim in Cairo in September.
The group warned soldiers and policemen to abandon their posts “to preserve their religion and lives”. It said it carried out Tuesday’s attack in response to the “apostate regime’s war on Islamic sharia, its shedding of Muslim blood and violation of our women’s and sisters’ honour.”
Investigators found a large crater at the site, where the bomber set off the explosives after crashing his car through barricades.
The military had sent tanks and armour to the Sinai peninsula to crush the militants, with limited success so far.
Two soldiers were shot dead last week in a botched attempt to arrest Ansar Beit Al Maqdis leader Shadi Al Menei, the military said. Menei escaped.
But the military says it has killed 184 “terrorists” in north Sinai, which borders the Palestinian Gaza Strip and Israel, since Mursi’s overthrow.
The sparsely populated desert and mountain region has presented a challenge to the army, which was unaccustomed to fighting against a sustained militant campaign. In November, an Ansar Beit Al Maqdis bombing killed 11 soldiers when an army bus drove past a booby trapped car on a desert road in north Sinai.
Tuesday’s attack, however, shocked the military-installed government in its scale and location. “This is the ugliest kind of terrorism,” prime minister Hazem Al Beblawi told reporters on Tuesday after the attack.
“What we saw yesterday was a qualitative transformation in terrorism,” he said. Beblawi, soon after the attack, had branded the Muslim Brotherhood a “terrorist” group, but stopped short of blaming it for the bombing.
AFP
