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Egypt orders cleric held over ElBaradei death call
CAIRO |
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's public prosecutor ordered the arrest of a Muslim cleric who said leaders of the main opposition coalition should be condemned to death under Islamic law for seeking to topple President Mohamed Mursi, the state news agency said on Monday.
Hardline Salafi Muslim cleric Mahmoud Shaaban was ordered held for questioning over comments in an online video clip for the religious channel al-Hafez calling for the death of leaders of the opposition National Salvation Front. He singled out liberal NSF politician Mohamed ElBaradei and leftist presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahy.
Shaaban "will be detained for questioning over charges that he incited the death of leaders of the NSF", MENA news agency reported.
The NSF has called for regular protests against Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood politician elected president in June, accusing him of trying to monopolize power.
ElBaradei, a former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, criticized the Islamist-led authorities last week for not acting to stop Shaaban. The government subsequently deployed a police guard at his home and outside the houses of other opposition figures.
Shabaan had said that the NSF leaders wanted power and were "burning Egypt" to get it. "It is clear now their sentence in God's law is death," he said in the video posted on YouTube on February 2.
(Writing by Marwa Awad; Editing by Paul Taylor and Jon Hemming)
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Also, take a look at this interesting insight written by one of Reuters opinion journalists (his name is no longer in the list, I wonder if he was fired of got another job):
QUOTE
Thank you for email. Predicting the future in the Middle East is a
hazardous undertaking but nevertheless, here we go. I don’t think there is much prospect of the Brotherhood winning more than
20% of the vote in free elections. (In the last reasonably free vote, in 2005, Brotherhood members running as independents — because the party as such is banned — won 88 seats out of 500-plus). So even if the Brotherhood turned fundamentalist, which I doubt, their influence would be limited by other parties in a government coalition, or in opposition.
END OF QUOTE
It seems he was quite mistaken in his understanding of the Arab “Spring”.
QUOTE:
But just let me ask you one question: is there any possibility of the MB now be playing a kind of populist game, like saying they will be
peaceful and democratic only to rise to power, and then, a few years
later, begin to show their violent objectives, for example towards
Israel?
END OF QUOTE
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