CAIRO, 1 December 2005 — Egyptian police rounded up almost 600 Muslim Brotherhood activists in the two days before the last stage of legislative elections in what the opposition Islamist group said was an attempt to disrupt its campaign.
The Brotherhood has shaken up Egyptian politics by winning 76 of the 444 elected seats in parliament two thirds of the way through the process.
The first day of voting for the final 136 seats is today. The Islamists are contesting 49 places.
Most of the new detentions were in the provinces which will vote today for the remaining seats, said Brotherhood spokesman Mohamed Osama yesterday.
In the last two weeks alone police have rounded up more than 1,600 Brotherhood members in connection with the elections but many of those have been released, the spokesman added.
The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) will retain a comfortable majority but the Brotherhood contingent will be the largest opposition group in parliament since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952.
Swords and Clubs
A Brotherhood statement on arrests in Dakahlia province in the Nile Delta said the arrests were intended to thwart the Islamic group’s election preparations.
The people detained include representatives of the candidates and those running their election campaigns, it added.
“The Interior Ministry alleges that these people of social and political weight... intended to corrupt the electoral process and that swords, knives and clubs were found in their possession,” it said.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said he had no information on the detentions.
The authorities routinely round up large numbers of Brotherhood activists before elections to undermine the Islamist group’s attempts to get out the vote.
But arrests before the second stage of voting earlier this month did not prevent the Brotherhood winning 42 seats, on top of 34 seats in the first stage.
Government officials have not shown any signs of alarm at the Brotherhood’s gains, but since the initial victories the security forces and NDP activists have tried to make life harder for the Islamists in many constituencies.
One Cabinet minister, speaking in private, said the vote for the Brotherhood was natural after the first contested presidential elections in September, won by President Hosni Mubarak with 89 percent of the vote.
He said that that on top of those who voted against Mubarak the Brotherhood has attracted a substantial protest vote from people unhappy with the NDP.
