Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood leader killed in Cairo gunbattle

Interior Ministry says Muhammad Kamal died in raid along with another senior member of Islamist group

By ToI Staff 4 October 2016, 8:05 am

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Egyptian riot police disperse students who support the Muslim Brotherhood and ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, during clashes following a demonstration at the Cairo University on April 15, 2014. (AFP/Mahmoud Khaled/File)

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s military wing was killed in a firefight with security forces in Cairo, Egypt’s interior ministry said early Tuesday.

Reuters quoted the ministry as saying that Muhammad Kamal was killed in a raid in a neighborhood of the capital along with Yasser Shehata, a fellow leader in the Islamist group.

According to the report, the Brotherhood posted on social media that Kamal had vanished on Monday afternoon, “but gave no further updates.”

A statement from the ministry said that Shehata had been sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison for “assaulting a citizen and forcibly detaining the person in the headquarters of the Freedom and Justice Party,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing. Kamal was also sentenced to life in prison in absentia, the statement said.

Egypt earlier this year accused the Muslim Brotherhood of working with Palestinian terror group Hamas in the 2015 murder of the country’s top prosecutor Hisham Barakat. Hamas denied the allegation.

Cairo regularly accuses Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, of supporting attacks in Egypt.

Former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, wearing a red jumpsuit that designates he has been sentenced to death, raises his hands inside a defendants cage in a makeshift courtroom at the national police academy, in an eastern suburb of Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, June 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil) — Former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, wearing a red jumpsuit that designates he has been sentenced to death, raises his hands inside a defendants cage in a makeshift courtroom at the national police academy, in an eastern suburb of Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, June 18, 2016. (AP/Amr Nabil)

Barakat, 64, was killed in a car bomb attack in the upscale east Cairo district of Heliopolis. He was the most senior government official killed since jihadists launched an insurgency following the 2013 military overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, who headed the Freedom and Justice Party.

After ousting Morsi, the authorities began a blistering crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood that has left hundreds of people dead and thousands jailed.

The Brotherhood, the country’s main opposition movement for decades, was blacklisted as a “terrorist group” in December 2013.

AFP contributed to this report