Interior Minister responsible for Rabaa massacre sentenced to 2 years in prison Nasr City Misdemeanor Court sentenced Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim to two years in prison on Tuesday, removing him from office, fining him LE101 and setting a bail of LE2,000 to suspend the sentence.
Ibrahim has been sentenced for failing to implement a court ruling in favor of two former political detainees.
The two detainees, Ali Ahmed and Abdel Alim Mohamed, had filed for compensation for the time they had spent in prison. A court ruled in favor of a LE25,000 compensation for them, yet the minister did not carry out the verdict.
Regarding student protests on universities: Reading through various social media sites (so nothing from an official news outlet) it appears that the army is trying to break into campuses to stop the protests. Moreover snipers have been deployed on buildings surrounding the campuses.
Snipers? What the hell is going on in those universities?!
Interior Minister responsible for Rabaa massacre sentenced to 2 years in prison Nasr City Misdemeanor Court sentenced Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim to two years in prison on Tuesday, removing him from office, fining him LE101 and setting a bail of LE2,000 to suspend the sentence.
Ibrahim has been sentenced for failing to implement a court ruling in favor of two former political detainees.
The two detainees, Ali Ahmed and Abdel Alim Mohamed, had filed for compensation for the time they had spent in prison. A court ruled in favor of a LE25,000 compensation for them, yet the minister did not carry out the verdict.
Regarding student protests on universities: Reading through various social media sites (so nothing from an official news outlet) it appears that the army is trying to break into campuses to stop the protests. Moreover snipers have been deployed on buildings surrounding the campuses.
Snipers? What the hell is going on in those universities?!
Well, that comes from some students who are participating in the protests it seems. Who knows what they saw but egyptian army deploying snipers to break up protests is nothing new. I found it here https://www.facebook.com/pages/Anti-coup-Egypt/617812251575037
General Sisi 'dreamed he would rule Egypt' Egypt's strongman defence minister, Gen Abdulfattah al-Sisi, has surprised followers and critics by apparently giving an off-the-record interview in which he says he learnt that he was to rule the country from a series of dreams.
In the nocturnal visions, Gen Sisi seemingly found the answers to questions of his future. In one, he met the former president, Anwar Sadat, who told him: “I always knew I would be president of the republic.” Gen Sisi saw himself answering: “I also know that I will be president of the republic.” In another, dreamed 35 years ago, he was wielding a sword on which the celebrated Muslim credo was written in red: “There is no God but God”.
In a particularly perplexing sequence of that dream, Gen Sisi saw himself wearing “an Omega watch with a big green star”. People in the dream asked him: “You, why do you have this watch?” He replied: “It is because of my name – it is Omega and I’m Abdulfattah, so there is something universal between us.”
1 dead at anti-military protests Police have killed one demonstrator and arrested 54 others during protests held across Egypt against the military-backed government, the country's interior ministry says.
Three policemen were also injured during the clashes, as Egyptian security forces used tear gas to disperse the demonstrations on Friday.
Tear gas grenades have become standard use against demonstrators in several Cairo districts after protesters took to the streets against the military's ousting of former president Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected leader.
Security officials accused protesters of torching a police car in the canal city of Suez, and destroying another police car in the southern city of Qena.
The protests went ahead despite the country being gripped by icy winter weather, resulting in a rare snow over Cairo, and rain elsewhere.
Protesters lobbed petrol bombs at the police in the capital, the security officials said.
Such demonstrations are regarded as illegal, since they do not conform to a new law requiring organisers to give three days notice of a protest and to have it approved by the government.
In Fayoum, south of Cairo, two policemen were wounded by buckshot at a protest, sources told the AFP news agency.
Police also intervened in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla to break up clashes between pro- and anti-military protesters.
Second set of 3 judges in MB trials step down Three judges presiding over the trial of Egypt's senior Muslim Brotherhood members have stepped down after the defendants disrupted the proceedings and chanted against the judiciary.
Wednesday's events were the second time that a three-judge panel resigned from the trial.
Previously, on October 29, three other judges stepped down after police failed to bring defendants into the court, citing an inability to secure the courtroom.
The move was at the time seen as a criticism of the fairness of the proceedings.
Morsi accused of stealing livestock In recent days, ousted president Mohamed Morsi has found himself accused of illegally acquiring poultry and cattle both as a fugitive inmate during Hosni Mubarak's reign, and as Egypt president in 2012-2013. On Saturday, judicial investigations led to an array of charges against 130 defendants from the Muslim Brotherhood, including Morsi, the group's supreme guide Mohamed Badie, and leading figure Essam El-Errian.
Apart from kidnapping and holding police officers hostage, using heavy artillery, and sabotaging governmental premises, the defendants are also charged with stealing poultry and cattle from jail facilities. A statement on the charges was issued by the office of the judge in charge of the investigations, who is affiliated with the Cairo Appeal Court. The statement announced that Morsi and the other defendants would be referred to the criminal court.
Two Egyptian soldiers killed during clashes with Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis Two Egyptian army soldier were killed Friday and eight were injured during intense clashes with Islamic extremists in the town of Sheikh Zuweid, in North Sinai, reported Al-Ahram’s Arabic website. Al-Ahram reported that civilians had also been injured in the fighting, including a 20-year-old woman.
Islamist militants have stepped up violence against security forces in the restive peninsula which borders Israel and the Gaza Strip since the July ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, killing dozens of military and police personnel in ongoing attacks.
Egyptian authorities have launched a military campaign in the peninsula to combat the growing insurgency.
MB launches ''Rabaa'' channel from Turkey The Muslim Brotherhood's new satellite channel, "Rabaa," launched Friday and is being aired from Turkey, reported Al-Ahram Arabic website. The channel is named after Cairo’s Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square, where hundreds were killed when security forces forcibly dispersed 14 August a sit-in held by supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi.
The channel’s sign is the four-finger Rabaa sign that Brotherhood and Morsi loyalists use in regular ongoing protests against what they describe as a “coup against the legtitimate president” in Egypt.
Egypt faces electricity blackouts Last week, millions of Egyptians suffered frequent blackouts. The phenomenon intensified on Wednesday with people in some areas reporting two-hour outages. The electricity ministry said a shortage of natural gas, necessary to operate power plants, caused the blackouts.
Ministry spokesperson Aktham Abul-Ela told Ahram Online that output was reduced by 1000 Megawatts on Wednesday.
Egypt's high season for electricity consumption is in the summer due to the increased use of air conditioning and ventilators.
Yearly Peak Load jumped from 25.700 Megawatts in 2011/12 to 27.000 last year. Currently it stands at 22.000 Megawatts, far below the peak.
Others blame poor maintenance of the national power grid and power plants.
Abul-Ela rejected claims consumption had decreased this year due to an economic slowdown, a months-long nighttime curfew and political instability.
Energy shortages helped spark protests against president Mohamed Morsi on 30 June.
Prominent liberal activists jailed for 3 years A Cairo court has sentenced three leading activists to three years in prison for organising an illegal protest, the latest move in a widening crackdown on critics of the interim government.
Two of the three activists, Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel, are leading members of the April 6 movement. The third is Ahmed Douma, a longtime activist who has been arrested under each of Egypt’s three post-revolutionary governments.
The court on Sunday also handed down fines of 50,000 Egyptian pounds ($7,200).
The defendants were charged with organising a protest last month outside Abdeen Court in downtown Cairo. Maher was at the court to turn himself in on charges connected with another illegal protest, also in November, outside the Shura Council, the upper house of parliament.
A restrictive law approved last month requires demonstrators to seek advance approval from the interior ministry.
The defendants were also charged with obstructing traffic, “thuggery,” and damaging private property: Security forces and protesters briefly scuffled with batons and plastic furniture from a nearby cafe. Officers said the defendants attacked them first. April 6 has denied this, and called the charges “political.”
Douma was arrested at his home several days after Maher turned himself in. Adel remained free until early Thursday morning, when he was detained during a raid on a local human rights organisation.
Thousands of people have been arrested since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi in July, most of them supporters of the president and his Muslim Brotherhood. But the crackdown has recently widened to include liberal and secular activists.
A bomb rips through a police station in Mansoura, kills 12 people A bomb blast tore through a police compound in Egypt's Nile Delta on Tuesday, killing 12 people and wounding 134 in one of the deadliest attacks since the army deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in July.
The army-backed government vowed to fight "black terrorism", saying the blast an hour after midnight in the city of Mansoura north of Cairo would not derail a political transition plan whose next step is a January referendum on a new constitution.
With eight policemen among the dead, the blast pointed to the risk of militancy moving to the densely populated Nile Valley from the Sinai Peninsula, where attacks have killed some 200 members of the security forces since Mursi's downfall.
"We face an enemy that has no religion or nation," Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim, the survivor of an assassination attempt in September, said while inspecting the scene of the blast, an Interior Ministry statement said.
The military-backed presidency declared it a terrorist attack. "These type of operations only increase the state's determination to uproot terrorism across the country," it said in a statement published by state-run media.
Egypt has suffered the deadliest internal strife in its modern history since the army deposed Mursi, the nation's first freely elected leader, on July 3 after big protests against him.
MB condemns the attack on police station Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood condemned a bomb attack on a security compound in the Nile Delta town of Daqahliya which killed 12 people and wounded more than 134 early on Tuesday. "The Muslim Brotherhood condemns in the strongest possible terms the attack on the police headquarters in Mansoura (region)," an emailed statement from the group's London press office said.
"The Muslim Brotherhood considers this act as a direct attack on the unity of the Egyptian people and demands an enquiry forthwith so that the perpetrators of this crime may be brought to justice."
Cabinet spokesman Sherief Shawki had blamed the blast on the Brotherhood group of ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, and said Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi had declared the group a terrorist organisation - claims the latter has stopped short to confirm.
“Whoever is behind this act is a terrorist and will be brought to justice and punished according to the law. But I don’t want to anticipate the incidents," Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi had said.
Egypt tags MB as a terrorist organization Egypt’s military-backed government announced Wednesday that it had formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, criminalizing the activities and finances of a movement that rose to power in national elections last year but has been crippled by a government crackdown since a coup in July.
Egyptian legal experts said the decree would shutter hundreds of charities and nongovernmental organizations affiliated with the Brotherhood, one of Egypt’s largest opposition groups. The organizations provide health care and other services in rural and poor urban areas that lack infrastructure.
Anyone who is a member of the Brotherhood, participates in its activities, or promotes or funds the group will be subject to prosecution under the Egyptian penal code, analysts said. Membership in a terror group is punishable by five years in prison. The maximum penalty for providing weapons and ammunition to a domestic terrorist group is death.
Ansar Jerusalem claims responsibility for the Mansoura blast Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, an Al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militant group, claimed responsibility Wednesday for the deadly bombings that rocked the Daqahliya Security Directorate in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura early Tuesday, according to an online statement. "Your brothers in Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, with the grace of God, were able to target the Daqahliya police headquarters," the group commented on Tuesday's attack in a statement posted on Islamist forums and written in the same format of previous statements released by the militant group to comment on earlier incidents, using a logo featuring a vertical machine gun.
The statement added the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber identified as "Abu Maryam."
The Mansoura explosion killed 16 and injured 134 in the worst terrorist assault on a government site since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July.
Once they declared Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, there was bound to be more repercussions. I can really see their point of view with all the things Morsi was saying and doing in the last days.
I see some reporters are still calling this the "interim government". I suppose that's how they should be phrasing it, but it still seems overly optimistic in a sad, bitterly ironic way. The writing's really on the wall on this one.
4 people injured in a bus explosion in Cairo At least four people were injured, one in a critical condition, when a bomb was hurled at a public bus in front of Azhar University in Egypt's capital, Cairo, raising concerns that violence in the strife-torn country is far from abating.
The area hit by the bomb was cordoned and is currently being investigated, Ministry of Interior's head of the explosives department General Alaa Abdel Thaher said on Thursday, according to state-run newspaper Ahram Gate.
A second home-made bomb was diffused around the same vicinity, according to Abdel-Thaher.
The blast comes a day after the military-backed government designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group and froze all of its activities and charity groups.
At least 14 people were killed on December 24 when bombs exploded at a police station in the Egyptian city of Mansoura.
The Azhar University has witnessed months of almost-daily rallies by students denouncing the July military-led ouster of the country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who hails from the Islamist group.
Anyone leading MB protests will be executed Interior Ministry spokesperson Hani Abdel Latif said in a press statement issued Thursday that the penalty for leading a Muslim Brotherhood demonstration will be the death sentence, even if it is a woman.
The harsh move comes in accordance with yesterday's declaration of the Broterhood a terrorist organization, which was issued after the car bombing in Mansoura that killed at least 15 people. Though an unaffiliated terrorist group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdes, claimed responsibility for the attack, the newly empowered political establishment has decided to ride the wave of fear and take the opportunity to further squash the only viable political opposition to their rule. Meanwhile, the interim government has yet to produce evidence linking the Brotherhood to the attack.
Following the ouster of Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsy, his opponents have pushed forward their democratic roadmap, which will supposedly bring the country closer to democracy. The latest move, however, seems to be further evidence that the new path set forth by the interim government is not one of a democracy, but rather a step back to the Mubarak-era police state that ruled with an iron fist and snuffed out all political opposition.
The next step in the roadmap, which is the most challenging one, is to approve the newly amended Constitution in a referendum to be held on 14 and 15 January. In defiance, the Brotherhood has vowed to block the referendum by protesting.
Egypt's interior ministry details sentences for associating with 'terrorist' Brotherhood Anyone who joins Muslim Brotherhood marches will receive a five-year prison sentence, the spokesman of Egypt's Ministry of Interior said Thursday following the government's declaration that the Brotherhood is a "terrorist" organisation, MENA reported. Those who are proved to be members in the Brotherhood, anyone who promotes the group verbally or in writing, as well as those caught carrying publications or recordings of the group, will also face the same sentence, ministry spokesman Hany Abd El-Fattah added.
Meanwhile, anyone who takes up an administrative position in the group, finances it with money or provides information to the group, will face a hard labour sentence.
In a press statement Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Hossam Eissa said the cabinet declared the Brotherhood a terrorist group, making it subject to Article 86 of the Egyptian penal code, which defines terrorism and the penalties for engaging in it.
1 student killed as anti-coup students protest Egyptian police said Friday a man died in clashes as tensions soared in Cairo following a bus bombing and further arrests of members of the Muslim Brotherhood after its listing as a terrorist group.
Defiant student supporters of the Brotherhood protested in Cairo on Thursday night, clashing with opponents of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in a flare up that left one person dead, the interior ministry said.
A Friday ministry statement added that seven Brotherhood supporters had been arrested after police intervened with tear gas.
The Islamists on Friday vowed to continue their protests, despite the ferocious crackdown on their movement.
"Let's begin with full force and peacefulness a new wave of majestic anti-coup action," said the Brotherhood-led Anti Coup Alliance in a statement.
Thursday's protests came hours after a bomb hit a bus in northern Cairo, wounding five people and prompting condemnation from US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Al Jazeera has confirmed that the deceased, a male, was in the university's agricultural department. Seven students were arrested during the clashes. [Reuters and Al Jazeera]
3 dead and 265 arrested in nationwide MB protests Three people have been killed and at least 265 others arrested during protests in Egypt, the Interior Ministry said.
The ministry said the three were killed in clashes between Muslim Brotherhood protesters and opponents on Friday.
"Brotherhood actions caused the deaths of three citizens when they clashed with residents," it said in a statement on the clashes, which took place in several cities.
The violence came amid an intensified crackdown on supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, which was declared a terrorist organisation earlier this week.
A 20-year-old protester was shot and killed in Damietta province, while another protester was killed in Menia when a tear gas canister struck him in the face. A third protester was killed in Cairo, according to the Health Ministry.
Police also fired tear gas and birdshots at protesters at al-Azhar university in Cairo's northern district of Nasr City.
Bomb explodes near the military intelligence building in Sharqiya At least five people have been injured in an explosion near the military intelligence building in Sharqiya, in Egypt’s Nile Delta, the third bombing on the mainland in less than a week.
State television said the explosion on Sunday morning was caused by a car bomb.
Colonel Ahmed Ali, a spokesman for the army, said the intelligence building was partly damaged by the blast. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Attacks on police and military installations have become a regular occurrence in Egypt.
On Tuesday, a powerful car bomb exploded near a police station in Mansoura, another city in the Delta, killing 14 people and injuring more than 150 others. Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, a Sinai-based group, claimed responsibility for the bombing in a statement posted online.
Egypt arrests four Al-Jazeera journalists for spreading 'false news' Egyptian police have arrested four Al-Jazeera journalists, including the TV network's Cairo bureau chief, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, and a former BBC correspondent, Peter Greste.
The interior ministry accused the journalists of holding "illegal meetings" with the banned Muslim Brotherhood, which was declared last week to be a terrorist organisation.
The military-backed interim government has launched a crackdown on the movement ever since the army ousted the Brotherhood-backed president, Mohammed Morsi, from power in July.
An interior ministry statement accused the journalists of broadcasting "false news" that was "damaging to national security". It said that cameras, recordings and other material had been seized from rooms at a Cairo hotel.
The journalists were said to possess materials that promoted "incitement", such as information about campus strikes by students who support the Brotherhood.