Qatar's ‘spy' OUSTED PRESIDENT Mohammed Morsi is charged with handing over classified documents to Qatar, according to the prosecutor general. In a statement released on Saturday, the prosecutor general states that Morsi is accused of handing over to the Qatari regime classified and presidential documents pertaining to national security while he was president. According to the statement, this was “the biggest conspiracy” committed by the Muslim Brotherhood against the nation. Investigators claim that Morsi exploited his position to appoint Muslim Brotherhood figures to sensitive positions, including Ahmed Abdel-Atti and Amin Al-Serafi as office manager and secretary, respectively. The statement further stated that it was Al-Serafi who transferred the documents, through his daughter Karima Al-Serafi and the Rassd News Network journalist Asmaa Al-Khateeb, to the Al-Jazeera correspondent Alaa Sablan, the Qatar regime's connection. The prosecutor general has referred the three defendants Morsi, Abdel-Atti and Al-Serafi — all already in custody — to the Criminal Court. According to the prosecution, the defendants will plead guilty to the charges levelled against them. Morsi is already at the centre of another case of espionage, in which he faces the charges of disclosing national-security secrets, funding terrorism and coordinating with jihadi terrorist organisations (Hamas and Hizbollah) both inside and outside Egypt. He is facing, in addition, charges of insulting the judiciary, inciting the killing of protesters during deadly clashes outside the presidential palace in December 2012, and escaping from prison in January 2011. The life of a conscript THE INTERIOR MINISTRY has denied allegations that a conscript was tortured to death in a security training camp in North Sinai. In a statement published on its official Facebook page, the ministry said that the conscript, Ahmed Khalil, 20, suffered “sudden exhaustion in training and died while efforts were being made to revive him.” A day earlier, however, news had circulated through several local media outlets that Khalil was tortured to death by a police officer in the North Sinai Karim Helal security training camp. Reports cited fellow conscripts testifying that Khalil was severely beaten by the officer following a trivial disagreement during training. He was said to have lost consciousness and died. Meanwhile, prosecutors have detained the officer in question for four days pending investigations. For his part, Abdel-Fattah Othman, the Assistant Interior Minister for Media Affairs, told the Al-Hayat satellite channel that the decision to detain the suspected officer for four days was “precautionary,” stressing that there are “no criminal suspicions behind the death of the soldier” whose health, he added, was already poorly. The head of the Forensic Medicine department, Hesham Abdel Hamid, said the body of Khalil “bore signs of severe flogging to the face and most of the body.” He added, “After blood samples are tested, it will be determined once and for all whether the cause of the death was sickness or beating.” Twenty years A CAIRO CRIMINAL court sentenced leading Muslim Brotherhood members Mohamed Al-Beltagi and Safwat Hegazi to 20 years in prison on Tuesday for torturing police officers during the Rabaa sit-in and for being members of an outlawed organisation. Al-Beltagi and Hegazi, along with two other defendants from the Rabaa field hospital, Abdel-Aziz Ibrahim and Mohamed Mahmoud, received 10 years in jail for detaining and torturing two police officers during the sit-in, and another 10 years each for belonging to and managing the Muslim Brotherhood, which was ruled a terrorist organisation last December. Al-Beltagy and Hegazi have already each received two life sentences for their roles in violent clashes last August outside the Istiqama Mosque in Giza and along the Qalyubia highway last July. Al-Beltagy was also sentenced to a year in prison on Saturday for insulting the judiciary. Dank on the street SECURITY FORCES dispersed the so-called Dank protests in downtown Cairo and Dokky on Tuesday. Called for by a new movement named after its Twitter hashtag, a colloquial Arabic word for extreme poverty, the protests were to be held on 9 September outside government cooperatives, public hospitals and transportation facility headquarters to demonstrate against deteriorating services and high food prices. “Go out and tell the government it must either provide a life of dignity or leave,” read a Facebook posting for the event. Because the protests were staged without notifying the Ministry of Interior (as the law requires), however, the protesters were promptly dispersed. Many observers had identified the movement as a (conscious or unconscious) act of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, the followers of which have been protesting the 2013 ouster of president Mohamed Morsi for over a year now. Movement organisers said that their alleged identification with the Brotherhood was an attempt to smear their sincere efforts. On Tuesday, Dank posted a video of people chanting in a Cairo train station, saying, “Government of humiliation and shame, the prices are soaring like fire.” It was described as the movement's “second protest.” The first was a march held earlier in the day in Alexandria with no more than 30 people present, judging by the video posted.
