CAIRO: While local press reports claim that Egypt has filed an official extradition order for businessman Mamdouh Ismail, the British ambassador repeatedly denied that this is true. In the notorious Al-Salam ferry case, Ismail was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in absentia earlier this month. The recent seven-year sentence overturned a previous verdict absolving him of all responsibility. During the opening of the new British visa application center in Cairo, British Ambassador Dominic Asquith said that "it did not come to his knowledge that Britain had received any requests from Egyptian authorities regarding Ismail "since the recent verdict was announced. A British embassy official confirmed this statement to Daily News Egypt. However, in its Friday edition, the opposition Al-Dostour newspaper claimed that a source inside the prosecutor general's office said that its affiliate International Cooperation Office had contacted British officials more than once including recently after the announcement of the new verdict, regarding Ismail's extradition. The ruling National Democratic Party's official newspaper, Al-Watany Al-Youm, concurred in an article titled "Intense efforts to bring Mamdouh Ismail back from Britain, which ran on Tuesday March 17. The article explains that the prosecutor general is particularly concerned about the case and that the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had contacted British authorities and asked them to hand over Ismail. The article also claimed that the British authorities had refused since there is no extradition agreement between the two countries, but that there have been negotiations since June 2008 to treat Ismail as an exception and to hand him over. Yet Yasser Fathi, a defense lawyer on behalf of the victims' families, is skeptical that Egyptian authorities had taken such an initiative. "Public opinion has to pressure them to bring Ismail back to implement the verdict . families, the press and activists have to lobby strongly for this. Only through their pressure will the government bring him back, he said. Ismail has been living in England since 2006. He was recently handed down a seven-year jail sentence in the case of the ill-fated Al Salam ferry (which he owned) that sank in Feb. 2006 in the Red Sea, killing over 1,000 people.
