CAIRO, 5 May 2005 — Egyptian riot police fired tear gas and clashed with demonstrators staging protests nationwide yesterday against President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, arresting more than 200 people, organizers said. Pro-reform activists have escalated their campaign for constitutional and political reforms in the country in recent weeks, with many calling on the veteran leader to step down when his mandate expires later this year.
Police clashed with hundreds in the town of Fayyum, as well as in Mansura and Zagazig in the Nile Delta region, and fired tear gas to disperse the crowds, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood claimed. It said security forces arrested about 100 protesters in Fayyum and another 100 in Zagazig in a day of coordinated rallies up and down the country it organized to press for political reforms.
The Brotherhood also reported demonstrations in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, Tanta, and Damanhur in the Delta region and in the capital, Cairo. Interior Ministry sources said police detained 80 protesters in Mansura, 100 in Zagazig and 30 in Fayyum. “No to dictatorship,” a group of an estimated 1,000 protesters chanted outside the Fatteh Mosque in central Cairo.
Meanwhile, about 100 people demonstrated before the prosecutor general’s office here yesterday calling for the release of members of Jihad and Al-Jemaah Islamiyah groups held before and after the assassination of Sadat. They said the detainees have already released years ago after they served their sentences. “It is very unfair that thousands of people are still in detention for no apparent reason ... the government should put an end to emergency law that gives the state extensive powers of arrest and detention of innocent people,” said one of the protesters.
Abboud El-Zomor, one of the assassins of Sadat called on the Egyptian authority to release him, saying he had completed his sentence, his attorney and a court official said. The 57-year-old lieutenant colonel should have been released in 2003, after serving 22 years for his part in plotting the assassination. El-Zomor was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum term under Egyptian law. But the Interior Ministry has the discretion to hold a prisoner for up to five years more on security grounds. The authorities have kept El-Zomor in prison until now. The attorney for the prisoner, Mamdouh Ismail, said according to Egyptian laws, El-Zomor should have been set free at least four years ago and that this is “a violation of the prisoner’s legal rights.”
El-Zomor was convicted in 1984 of plotting the assassination and belonging to the Islamic Jihad group. Ismail told Arab News that El-Zomor has already sent a request to the Ministry of Interior asking to meet member of the European Union to discuss the reasons and conditions of his arrests and to clear all the misconception the Union has about the Jihad group.
