CAIRO, 20 August 2007 — The military trial of 40 members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood on charges of money laundering and financing a banned organization resumed yesterday amid an ongoing clampdown on the Islamists. Police have arrested at least 34 other members of Egypt’s main opposition movement over the last two days, feeding accusations that the politically charged trial is part of a broader policy of silencing the powerful group.
Police arrested 18 Muslim Brothers in towns north of Cairo yesterday, having already detained 16 leading members in another swoop in the capital on Friday. “There’s only one explanation for this oppression, it’s the sign of a faltering regime that is riven with corruption,” Brotherhood’s supreme guide Mohammed Mehdi Akef told AFP.
He said at least 550 Brothers have been arrested in recent months, including spokesman Essam Al-Aryan and another senior figure, Mahmoud Hussein, who were held on Friday. The Muslim Brotherhood, which describes itself as a moderate organization that wants to bring Islamic law to Egypt, has been outlawed since 1954.
The group holds more than a fifth of the seats in Parliament, but its representatives sit as independents because of its illegal status. The latest crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, which began last December, has especially targeted the organization’s funding, freezing its assets and arresting prominent businessmen associated with the movement.
“The current repression of the Muslim Brotherhood could be explained by the desire politically to pull the carpet from under their feet,” Amr Shubaki, an Islamist expert from Cairo’s Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, told AFP. He says the regime wants to put pressure on the Brothers to go back on the planned publication of their political program, a document that has already been widely leaked to the Egyptian press.
“Whether they’re sincere or not, that’s how they want to take over the political-media stage from a regime whose image is of a nondemocratic and corrupt power,” he said.
