Former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi and 10 of his Muslim Brotherhood associates will soon appear in court to face charges of leaking classified documents, mainly related to the army budget and military purchases, to Qatar via Al-Jazeera satellite television channel, according to judicial sources speaking on Tuesday. The allegations form the basis of the fourth case against Morsi, removed from office following mass protests against his year-long rule. He is currently being tried on charges that he ordered the killing of peaceful protesters in front of the Al-Ittihadiya Palace in December, 2012, of collaborating with foreign elements to spread chaos and for breaking out of prison and helping Islamist jihadists loot prison weapon depots during the 2011 uprising. The new charges signal a deepening of the crisis in relations between Egypt and Qatar. The Gulf state's neighbours have long accused Doha of providing a safe haven for the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadist terrorists, and of using Al-Jazeera satellite channel to undermine Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi's presidency. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar last March, accusing Qatar of adopting pro-Muslim Brotherhood policies that threatened the national security of Egypt and of its Gulf neighbours. During his year in office, Morsi strengthened ties with Doha, which offered Egypt billions of dollars in economic assistance. In a television interview security analyst Sameh Seif Al-Yazal said he expects the new trial to expose the deep links between the Qatari state and the Muslim Brotherhood. “Qatar turned itself into a sanctuary for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist jihadists a long time ago,” said Al-Yazal. “Yet it's only now that the western media has begun to raise questions about Qatar's funding of militant Islamist organisations like the Islamist State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).” Muslim Brotherhood lawyers say the evidence presented to support the new charges against Morsi is flimsy. “The charges are quite clearly politically led. They are part of military regime's attempts to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood and its leaders,” Islamist lawyer Mohamed Touson told parliamentary reporters. In June relations between Egypt and Qatar sank to a new low when a Cairo court found three Al-Jazeera journalists guilty of spreading false information. “They used their jobs in the media to falsify information about Egypt and try and propagate the image of a country sliding into a civil war,” said the court. Morsi was interrogated by a team of state security prosecutors for three hours at Alexandria's Borg Al-Arab prison, says Prosecutor General Hesham Barakat. “Morsi was asked a total of 120 questions. He refused to answer even one, insisting that he remained the legitimate president of Egypt and that his lawyer must be present,” said a statement issued by Barakat's office. Prosecutors said Morsi was confronted with reports prepared by the National Security Agency, the State Security Investigation Apparatus and the General Security Directorate detailing the ways he passed classified documents to Qatar. Barakat's office charges that six Muslim Brotherhood officials, including Morsi's private secretary Amin Al-Serafi, collaborated to pass classified documents to Qatar's intelligence agency. The Prosecutor's office further accuses Al-Serafi of using his daughter Karima to act as a courier for classified documents after Morsi's removal from office. According to prosecutors: “Al-Serafi was able to contact his daughter Karima from jail and instruct her and other Brotherhood members to hand copies of the original documents to a Palestinian man, Alaa Omar Sablan, who would then take them to Qatar and hand them to intelligence officials there. Prosecutors say Sablan travelled to Qatar via Turkey last December. In Doha he met with Ibrahim Mohamed Hilal, Al-Jazeera's Egyptian director of news, who arranged for a meeting with a Qatari intelligence officer. “During this meeting, which was held at a Qatari hotel, the intelligence officer said he needed the original documents and offered $1.5 million in cash for them,” prosecutors claimed. “The Qatari intelligence officer gave Sablan a down-payment of $50,000 in cash.” Of this sum, say prosecutors, Sablan sent $10,000 to two Muslim Brotherhood members in Cairo via an international money transfer company, asking them to prepare the original documents. One of two men, Ahmed Ismail, a professor at a private university, was arrested while copying the original documents. Police forces then stormed the house of Mohamed Kilani, another Brotherhood member, where they reportedly found hundreds of classified documents relating to the Ministry of Defence, the National Security Agency, the Administrative Control Agency, the Justice Ministry and the General Security Directorate. Prosecutors accuse Kilani, who worked as an air steward, of carrying documents to Qatar, some of which were used by Al-Jazeera in its programme “The Egyptian Event.”
