CAIRO: Egypt charged ousted president Mohamed Mursi and nine others yesterday with endangering national security by leaking state secrets and sensitive documents to Qatar, furthering a state crackdown on his outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
Relations between Qatar and Egypt have been icy since July 2013, when Egypt’s then-army chief Abdel Fattah Al Sisi toppled Mursi after protests against his rule.
Security sources had said last month that Egypt was investigating Mursi in connection with documents they said were leaked to Qatar and its satellite news channel Al Jazeera.
The Egyptian public prosecutor’s office said that its secret investigation had unearthed enough evidence of espionage to charge Mursi and nine others in a criminal court. The maximum penalty if convicted is death.
“The inquiries ... exposed humiliating facts and the extent of the largest conspiracy and treason carried out by the terrorist Brotherhood organisation against the nation through a network of spies,” it said in a three-page statement.
The public prosecutor said Mursi’s aides were involved in leaking to Qatari intelligence and Al Jazeera, documents which exposed the location of and weapons held by the Egyptian armed forces and detailed the country’s foreign and domestic policies.
The Qatari Foreign Ministry in Doha did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the accusations. Al Jazeera, which has been banned from Egypt, has denied any bias in reporting events there or any role in aiding the Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood dismissed the charges as political. “Today is the start of yet another kangaroo trial... Mursi’s trials are politically motivated cases with trumped up charges and a corrupt judiciary preciding over it,” Abdulla El Haddad, a Brotherhood spokesman based in Britain, said by email.
In a detailed statement, the prosecutor said his inquiry had found that Mursi’s secretary Amin Al Srifi abused his position to slip documents from Egypt’s security agencies to Jordanian Al Jazeera journalist Alaa Sabalan via his own daughter Karima and four other intermediaries. Subsequent interrogations had also linked Mursi and his office manager Ahmed Abdelatti to the case, it said.
The prosecutor charged Mursi and his two aides, Abdelatti and Srifi, as well as seven others in the case. Three of the accused are at large and the prosecutor called for their arrest pending trial.
REUTERS
