I KNOW ANOTHER COUNTRY THAT NEEDS TO DO THE SAME WITH THEIR PRESIDENT.... CAIRO — Egyptian authorities escalated their battle against ousted president Mohamed Morsi and his supporters Friday, launching an investigation into espionage and murder allegations against him as millions took to the streets in rival demonstrations across the country. The allegations marked the state’s first legal steps against Morsi, who has been held incommunicado since he was deposed this month in a military coup. The steps were taken as the military supervised mass rallies in Cairo that it had called to back its “mandate” to confront violence and “terrorism” — words that rights groups and Morsi’s supporters interpreted as signaling an imminent crackdown. While the demonstrations were mostly peaceful, deadly clashes broke out in the coastal city of Alexandria. Judicial authorities said prosecutors are investigating allegations that Morsi conspired with the militant Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas in a 2011 prison break that freed him and about 30 other Muslim Brotherhood members amid the chaos of the Arab Spring uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. The allegations also include murder and kidnapping in connection with the prison break northwest of Cairo, in which prosecutors say Hamas gunmen attacked the facility at the behest of Morsi and the Brotherhood, killing 14 guards. The Brotherhood and Hamas separately denied the allegations. The Brotherhood said local residents carried out the attack to free their relatives. The judicial announcement was the first official comment on Morsi’s legal status since he was ousted, and his supporters, who gathered by the hundreds of thousands in Cairo and Alexandria on Friday, quickly dismissed the allegations as political. “The charges are nothing more than an attempt by the coup leaders to discourage the public from supporting the president’s legitimacy,” said Alaa Abdel-Aziz, who served as Morsi’s culture minister until he and other Islamist and Brotherhood cabinet members were ousted on the day of the coup. The notion that Egypt’s elected president had worked “as a spy for Hamas” is a “silly accusation,” he said. “These are old tactics. They remind me of the ’50s and ’60s,” he added, referring to the military rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser, under which the Muslim Brotherhood was brutally repressed. Pro-Morsi demonstrators came under attack in Alexandria when plainclothes men broke through their protest lines, assaulting them with rocks and rubber bullets, witnesses said. Amr Nasr, the head of the ambulance services in Alexandria, said five people were killed and 140 injured in clashes in the city Friday. The Muslim Brotherhood said more than 300 people were injured. A spokeswoman for the Brotherhood-led Anti-Coup, Pro- Democracy Alliance said that the attack came in two waves and that the men who descended on the pro-Morsi demonstrators included uniformed police officers. The protesters were kneeling to pray when “thugs attacked,” said the spokeswoman, Farida Mustafa. “Later, after the prayer, police officers alongside thugs attacked the protesters with live bullets, rubber bullets and tear gas.”
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 02:28:04 +0000