Khalid Siddiqi gives a sermon at the Islamic Society of San Francisco on June 21, 2019. (Screen capture: YouTube)
An imam in San Francisco claimed the death of former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi during a court hearing this month was the work of “Zionist agents.”
Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was Egypt’s first democratically elected leader. He was ousted and imprisoned by the Egyptian military in 2013.
Egyptian state television reported Morsi died of a heart attack, but the Muslim Brotherhood said he was killed, a claim echoed by ally Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Mohammed Morsi, the only democratically elected president of Egypt, was killed by those Zionist agents,” Khalid Siddiqi of the Islamic Society of San Francisco said in a June 21 sermon.
Video of the sermon was released by the Middle East Media Research Institute monitoring group.
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Siddiqi lamented that there were many of these “Zionist agents” in the Muslim world “nowadays” and said they were “working for Satan and becoming the disciples of Satan.”
Egypt’s ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi gestures from behind the defendant’s bars during his trial at the police academy in Cairo on May 7, 2016. (AFP Photo/Khaled Desouki)
He also said Morsi “was only trying to help humanity by bringing the truth of Islam.”
“This individual was trying to do simply that thing but obviously, the forces of evil, as they did not allow the president who was democratically elected in Algeria to continue, they did not not allow Morsi as well,” Siddiqi said.
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He appeared to be referring to the 1991 Algerian parliamentary elections, which were canceled after an Islamist party appeared on track to a sweeping victory, setting off a decade-long civil war.
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