CAIRO, 7 May 2005 — Egyptian security forces yesterday arrested four leaders of the banned-but-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood, two days after mass demonstrations swept main towns calling for reform, a movement source said. “Essam El-Erian was arrested and his house was searched yesterday by police,” a spokesman of the Islamist group, Abdul Moneim Mahmoud, told reporters.
Erian is a leader of the movement, which has been banned since 1954 but still ranks as Egypt’s leading opposition force and has stepped up its demands for reforms ahead of presidential and legislative polls. He is also the official spokesman of the movement’s supreme guide Mohammed Mehdi Akef.
Police also arrested Omar Darrag, president of Cairo University’s lecturers’ club, teacher Hamdi Shahin and Yasser Abdoh, all of whom are Brotherhood leaders, said Mahmoud. The detained men stand accused of “preparing to hold banned demonstrations,” he said, adding that police had been told about demonstrations to be held at several mosques in the capital yesterday to show support for Palestinians.
Police reported 400 arrests in the past few days across the country with 350 Brothers placed in preventive detention for 15 days for having violated a ban on street protests and allegedly “wounding several officers and soldiers”.
The Brotherhood said as many as 2,000 of its followers had been arrested during and after its wave of pro-reform demonstrations Wednesday, but without giving details on the number of those placed in preventive detention.
The Interior Ministry said nearly 200 other members of the Brotherhood, which is usually tolerated, were arrested yesterday for demonstrating “in a way which breached security considerations”. The protesters were calling for the release of hundreds detained in nationwide Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations for reform this week and demanding political change.
The Brotherhood said in a statement police had arrested more than 2,000 people in the last few days. More than 5,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters demanded their release in yesterday’s protests in Cairo and north of the city. Brotherhood members said police confined protesters inside a mosque in the town of Mansoura, north of Cairo.
Tareq Ghannam, trapped inside the building, died when police outside fired tear gas, his brother Sayyed Ghannam told Reuters. But the Interior Ministry said four officers and 26 other people were injured when protesters threw stones at them. The police used tear gas to break up the protest and Ghannam was killed in a crush of demonstrators, it said.
Some 80 people were detained in protests in Cairo. “Reform for the Brotherhood means freedom and the right to form a party,” chanted more than 2,000 protesters penned in by riot police outside a mosque in the Giza district of the city.
