Egypt Opens Murder, Conspiracy Investigation Against Morsi
by Scott Neuman July 26, 201311:07 AM
Supporters of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi attend a Friday rally in Cairo. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images
Egyptian prosecutors have opened an investigation into ousted President Mohammed Morsi, who they suspect of conspiracy and murder, raising tensions as both Islamists and supporters of newly installed military chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi turn out for street protests.
The surprise announcement of the investigation against Morsi, who was removed in a July 3 coup, stem from a 2011 prison break in which Morsi escaped and at least 14 guards were killed. Hamas gunmen are said to have led the attack at Wadi el-Natroun prison, an allegation the militant group has denied.
Judge Hassan Samir said Morsi conspired with Hamas to carry out "aggressive acts in the country." Morsi was among about 30 members of the Muslim Brotherhood who broke out of prison in the final days of the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, who was forced to step down in February 2011.
The allegations against Morsi are seen by his supporters as politically motivated. NPR's Cairo bureau chief, Leila Fadel, tells Morning Edition .. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=205695294 .. there's been huge international pressure to release Morsi and that the allegations announced Friday are "the first legal reason given" for his continued detention.
El-Sissi called on his supporters to turn out in street protests Friday in what he's described as a "war against terrorism" against Islamists.
The Associated Press reports:
~~~~~ "El-Sissi's portrait pervaded the crowds of tens of thousands in Cairo's central Tahrir Square: the smiling general in sunglasses on posters proclaiming 'the love of the people,' a combination photo of the general and a lion on lanyards hanging from people's necks, a picture of his face Photoshopped into a 1-pound note of currency. ...
"Morsi's Islamist backers, in turn, were packing their own rallies in Cairo and elsewhere Friday in what they called the day 'to bring down the coup,' referring to el-Sissi's July 3 deposing of Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected president." ~~~~~
Fadel says: "There's a real fear that this will go from rival protests today to a serious crackdown in the coming days from the security forces."
Correction at 8:52 p.m. ET. Morsi Is Investigated:
An earlier version of this post said Morsi had been formally charged. Instead, the Egyptian government has opened an investigation into allegations of murder and conspiracy. Formal charges may follow.
Update At 5:30 p.m. EDT:
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, reporting from Cairo says that at least five people have been killed and more than 200 injured in clashes between supporters of Morsi and el-Sissi.
She says some of the worst clashes were in the northern city of Alexandria, where video taken by the Muslim Brotherhood showed el-Sissi supporters flinging rocks at pro-Morsi demonstrators.
"[Muslim] Brotherhood officials accused security forces in Alexandria of aiding those carrying out the attacks, a charge security leaders denied," Soraya says.
Local and international figures condemn the deaths following clashes between Morsi supporters and security forces.
Last Modified: 28 Jul 2013 04:27
Reports on the number of deaths vary from 65 to 120, depending on the source of information [Reuters]
Egyptian Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei has strongly condemned the "excessive use of force" in Egypt after deadly clashes between supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi and security forces.
"I strongly condemn the excessive use of force and the deaths, and I am working hard and in every direction to end the confrontation in a peaceful way, God protect Egypt and have mercy on the victims," he said on his Twitter account on Saturday.
Condemnation also came from the sheikh of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's top authority.
"The sheikh of Al-Azhar deplores and condemns the deaths of a number of martyrs who were victims of today's events," Ahmed al-Tayyeb, who heads the Cairo-based Al-Azhar, said in a statement.
The grand imam called for an "urgent judicial investigation" and punishment of those responsible "regardless of their affiliation".
Witnesses accused security forces of using live fire, but the interior ministry said only tear gas was fired at demonstrators.
Morsi's camp said more than 100 people were killed, while the health ministry said 72 people were killed, and 292 injured in Nasr City.
Mohamed Adel, a member of the April 6 youth movement political bureau, told Al Jazeera that the movement condemns the killing of protesters, and calls for the removal of the interior minister.
The April 6 movement participated in several protests against the deposed president, and criticised his policies.
'Inciting supporters'
Meanwhile the National Salvation Front released a statement, expressing "deep sadness" for the deaths of Egyptian citizens in the clashes.
It went on to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood for gathering its supporters at Rabaa Al Adawiyeh Mosque for the past month and "inciting its supporters to attack private and public properties, threatening the lives of Egyptian citizens".
"The Muslim Brotherhood is convincing its supporters they will be honoured by gaining 'shahada' [dying for the sake of God], if they participate in these hostile attacks."
The movement went on to call for an independent judiciary committee to investigate the events.
The Brotherhood, meanwhile, accused the Egyptian military of having "crossed all red lines [...] they killed men, women and children. They arrested thousands of people", according to spokesperson Gihad El-Haddad.
"There is no meeting ground. This is a zero-sum equation. It's either us or them in the equation. It's either we fully reverse this military coup, and continue back into constitutional legitimacy, or we die trying," he told Al Jazeera.
'Pivotal moment'
Secretary of State John Kerry said Egypt is at "a pivotal moment" more than two years since the uprising ousted the longtime President Hosni Mubarak.
Kerry said the "final verdict" of the revolution that brought Morsi to power as Egypt's first democratically elected leader before the military recently toppled him "will be forever impacted by what happens right now".
He added that Egyptian officials "have a moral and legal obligation" to respect the right of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.
He said the continued violence sets back efforts of "reconciliation and democratisation," and affects regional stability.
The European Union said it deplored the loss of life in Egypt and was following developments there with concern after the deadly clashes.
EU foreign affairs head Catherine Ashton said the authorities should ensure a speedy transition to civilian rule and repeated demands that political detainees, including Morsi, should be released.
A spokesman said Ashton "deeply deplores the loss of life".
Ashton called on all sides to avoid violence, stressing that the "only solution is a rapid move to an inclusive transformation process", adding that "all political groups", including Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, must be involved.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the violence, saying "In Egypt, democracy was massacred, national aspirations were massacred, and now the nation is being massacred."
"Those who remain silent in the face of this massacre have blood on their hands and on their faces," said Erdogan, whose ruling party has close ideological ties with Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.
.. hard to put myself in the military's shoes, but i think they made a big mistake when they came down so hard .. did they really have to arrest and jail so many? .. and Morsi .. couldn't they have investigated his stuff with Hamas and only arrested him if they had a good case?
Lawless Sinai Shows Risks Rising in Fractured Egypt
Narciso Contreras for The New York Times
A Christian church's gate in El Arish, in Sinai, was chained shut recently.
By ROBERT F. WORTH Published: August 10, 2013
SHEIKH ZWAYD, Egypt — Every night at dusk, the streets of this desert town near the Israeli border empty out, and the chatter and thump of gunfire and explosives begin. Morning reveals the results: another dead soldier, another police checkpoint riddled with bullets, another kidnapping. In mid-July, the body of a local Christian shop owner was found near the town cemetery, his head severed, his torso in chains.
An officer guarded a police station in El Arish. Christians and others have been targets in the town.
The northern Sinai Peninsula, long a relatively lawless zone, has become a dark harbinger of what could follow elsewhere in Egypt if the interim government cannot peacefully resolve its standoff with the Islamist protesters camped out in Cairo.
In the five weeks since Egypt’s military ousted the Islamist president .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/world/middleeast/egypt.html , Mohamed Morsi, the endemic violence here has spiraled into something like an insurgency, with mysterious gunmen attacking military and police facilities every night.
Last week, the violence threatened to draw in Israel. On Thursday, Israel briefly closed an airport at the Red Sea resort of Eilat after Egyptian officials warned about the possibility of militants firing rockets from Sinai. The next day .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/world/middleeast/sinai-blasts-kill-up-to-5-islamic-militants.html , up to five suspected militants were killed and a rocket launcher was destroyed in an airstrike in Sinai, the state news media reported, and there were unconfirmed reports that Israel had carried out the strike.
The Sinai attacks have taken about 62 lives, officials say, not counting the 60 suspects the Egyptian authorities claim to have killed. There has also been a troubling rise in attacks on Christians, who are fleeing the area in large numbers.
Although the world’s attention has been focused on Cairo, where about 140 Islamist Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been killed in clashes with the police since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, the chaos in Sinai in some ways represents a more troubling prospect. Unlike the Brotherhood, which has a longstanding commitment to nonviolence, the jihadists here are out for blood, and they appear to have been energized by the military’s reassertion of power. Some Egyptians fear a renewal of the kind of terrorism they suffered during the 1990s, especially if the military resorts to an even broader and more forceful crackdown.
The northern Sinai may be both a symptom and a cause of Egypt’s festering crisis: one of the military’s reasons for ousting Mr. Morsi was the belief that he was too soft on the jihadists here and saw them as potential allies. Yet the military, for all its warlike talk, seems unable to thwart the mysterious bands of gunmen who own the night here.
“We are living in a state of constant terror, but we see nothing from the police or the army,” said Mitri Shawqi Mitri, a 53-year-old Christian shopkeeper whose son, Mina, was kidnapped by gunmen early this month. “Everything has stopped for us, there is no work, all the churches have closed, the priests have fled.”
Like many Christians living in Sinai, Mr. Mitri plans to leave, and a wall of his modest house in the town of El Arish has the words “For Sale” scrawled on it in Arabic. At least one Christian priest here has been killed in the past month, and several Christians have been kidnapped, including two women and Magdy Lamy, the shopkeeper who was beheaded. Many others have received death threats from militant Islamists warning them to leave Sinai, Mr. Mitri and other local Christians said.
As Mr. Mitri sat talking to a reporter in his home, he received a text message from the kidnappers, who were demanding a ransom of 150,000 Egyptian pounds, about $21,500. “They want to know if I have the money in the house with me,” he said, his face creased with anger and fear.
The military announced last week on its Facebook page that its counterterrorism operation over the past month in Sinai had led to 103 arrests, and the destruction of 102 tunnels, 40 underground fuel storage tanks and 4 houses used by extremists. The reference to tunnels, presumably those used to smuggle weapons and goods into Gaza, tallies with the military’s routine suggestions that Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, is involved in the violence. However, there is no evidence to suggest that is true.
Most residents here say the authorities appear to be on the defensive, with soldiers and the police hunkered down at their posts and suffering daily casualties.
Although the attackers mainly hit the police and the military, a dozen civilians have been killed in the cross-fire and many others have been wounded, according to local hospital officials. Hanny Aish, a worker at a cement factory, was on a bus in the wee hours of July 15 when a rocket-propelled grenade crashed through the window, killing 3 of the 20 people on board and wounding the rest.
“I was sitting behind the driver, and all of a sudden I had flesh and blood all over me,” Mr. Aish, who suffered glass cuts across his body and shattered eardrums, said during an interview at his home.
The attackers’ target appears to have been an armored vehicle that passed by just afterward. But as in the rest of Egypt, even the most basic perceptions of the conflict reflect a bitter division between supporters and opponents of Mr. Morsi. The first group tends to blame the military for all the recent attacks here, saying it is staging fake jihadist attacks to build a pretext for a future crackdown.
Sameh Muhammad, a conservative Muslim whose brother Salem was killed in the same bus attack in which Mr. Aish was wounded, said he believed an Egyptian military jet had fired a missile at the bus — despite the testimony of witnesses like Mr. Aish and photographs that appear to show that the bus was struck from the side.
“We heard that a witness saw the jet firing a rocket at the bus,” said Mr. Muhammad, a religious teacher dressed in a white skullcap and gown, with the long, scraggly beard of a hard-line Salafist Muslim. “They always say that Islamists have done this kind of crime,” he said, as a pretext “to crack down on the whole movement.”
Jihadism has long been a problem in Sinai, which was under Israeli occupation from 1967 to 1982. The area’s independent Bedouin tribes have resisted full integration into the state, and smuggling and drug trafficking to neighboring Israel and Gaza have been rampant here for decades.
But the Egyptian state has contributed to the problem, local leaders say. “They treated us all as traffickers and criminals, and this marginalization made a fertile ground for terrorism,” said Sheik Abdelhadi Etaik Sawarka, a leader of one of the area’s main tribes.
After the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the security services withdrew from Sinai, leaving a vacuum where armed Islamists thrived, and some foreign fighters filtered into the area. The militants also gained access to more sophisticated weapons from Libya after the civil war in that country, analysts say.
There are persistent rumors that the fighters have acquired surface-to-air missiles that could threaten aircraft in Egypt and Israel, though these have not been confirmed.
The identities of the attackers in Sinai remain mysterious: no one has claimed responsibility, and the Egyptian authorities have said little about them, helping to fuel conspiracy theories. But “it appears that Islamist militants are taking advantage of a fluid situation,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an expert on Egyptian politics and the military at the Century Foundation.
The biggest concern for the United States and Israel, Mr. Hanna added, is “the possibility that Egypt has lost control over what’s going on in the Sinai.”
Some Islamists and Bedouins here claim that Mr. Morsi’s administration was a welcome relief from the heavy-handed approach of Hosni Mubarak and his predecessors. But the change was mostly a matter of tone. Mr. Morsi ordered a crackdown on the jihadists, especially after 16 soldiers were killed by gunmen at a Sinai military base last August, though the subsequent military campaign was short and yielded few results.
All the Islamic groups with an official presence here deny responsibility for the recent violence. But some of the more conservative Islamists also talk with a certain confidence about their situation, as if they held a trump card.
“If the military pushes the Brotherhood down here, it will have to push all the Islamic groups down, because they are all supporting the Brotherhood,” said Sheik Asaad el-Bayk, a Shariah court judge and a leader in a new hard-line Islamic movement called People of the Sunna and the Community. “They cannot do that, because it would mean major violence.”
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo, and Muhammad Sabry from El Arish, Egypt.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 11, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lawless Sinai Shows Risks Rising in Fractured Egypt.
"Egyptian Liberals Embrace the Military, Brooking No Dissent"
Reposted to include missing link
Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi speaks during a press conference in Bucharest, Romania, on June 19. (Vadim Ghirda/AP)
By Editorial Board Oct. 1, 2019 at 7:26 a.m. GMT+10
EGYPTIAN RULER Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has become President Trump’s “favorite dictator .. https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-awaiting-egyptian-counterpart-at-summit-called-out-for-my-favorite-dictator-11568403645 ” in part by offering the assurance of stability in the Arab world’s most populous country. So the president and those who share his views ought to be worried by the recent news from Cairo. Young Egyptians fed up with stagnating living standards and the Sissi regime’s corruption have taken to the streets on two consecutive Fridays to shout slogans against the strongman.
Their numbers have been relatively small — probably in the hundreds. But Mr. Sissi’s reaction has been telling. In the past 10 days, he has launched what looks like a panicked attempt to prevent the protests from swelling. According to human rights groups, more than 2,000 people have been arrested, from known critics of the regime to random young people swept up on the streets. Access to the Internet has been restricted, and foreign journalists have been warned that they must report “the viewpoint of the State .. https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/egypt/egypt-warns-journalists-says-coverage-of-rare-anti-sissi-protests-being-monitored-1.7873356 .”
Though few expect another revolution in the near future, the unrest — and Mr. Sissi’s reaction to it — is a clear warning that Egypt under his rule is anything but stable. Though the economy is growing, so is the poverty rate .. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2019/08/08/egypt-is-reforming-its-economy-but-poverty-is-rising . Mr. Sissi has squandered billions on pharaonic projects, such as an expansion of the Suez Canal and a new capital city.
The State Department last week said Egyptians should be allowed to protest peacefully, as did the Democratic chairman and ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. But Mr. Sissi takes his cues from the White House. As long as he remains Mr. Trump’s favorite dictator, we can expecting unrelenting — and ultimately destabilizing — repression in Egypt.
Where Does the Muslim Brotherhood Go From Here? Reckoning with Morsi's failure P -.. though we've all seen many 'What now for MBs?' and know after the Morsi overreach set-back, they have no real recourse except to adjust, one question is how they might adjust .. this one adds something hopefully new here .. one option, leave politics to the FJP .. then, if .. then what? P - "the issue is not only what the Brotherhood learns; the issue is also what Islamists are taught." http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=89734582 and preceding (and any future following)
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
