AYMAN Mohamed Rabie al-Zawahri was born on June 19, 1951 in Cairo. His grandfather, Mohamed el-Ahmedi al- Zawahri, was a Sheikh in Al-Azhar Mosque in the 1930s and his father was a professor in the Faculty of Pharmacy in Cairo University. Al-Zawahri graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in 1974 and obtained a Master's in surgery four years later. You probably think that the rest of this article is going to be about a ‘happily ever after'story, but you're quite mistaken. In 1981, Ayman al-Zawahri joined the Egyptian Jihad (an extremist terrorist organisation). His godfather and mentor was a man called Khaled Al-Islambouli, who, along with al-Zawahri and other terrorists, killed late Egypt's President Anwar el-Sadat in October 1981. Along with 300 others, al-Zawahri was accused of being behind a coup d'état and received a three-year jail sentence. He then left Egypt and turned up in Afghanistan. Ayman al-Zawahri is al-Qaeda number two after Bin Laden. Al-Zawahri's story is the subjects of a new film starring Egyptian actor Ahmed Ezz. Shooting starts next month and the movie is expected to hit the cinema screens in the summer. It all started when Ezz and the director, Ahmed Alaa, called up scenarist Hazem el- Hadidi and said: "We need to make a new film dealing with a new issue." "I liked the idea a lot and so did the producer, Wael Abdullah. We knuckled down to work straightaway," Ezz told the Egyptian magazine al-Mussawar. Some people don't welcome this movie, as they are afraid of al-Qaeda's reaction. "It's not true that al-Qaeda have threatened us for portraying al-Zawahri, although some of our friends in the cinemasector advised us not to make this film, so as not to make problems, because the film is about terrorism," he explained. "But we refused." All the scenes of the film will be shot in Egypt, while Abdullah and Ezz travelled to Italy to buy 3D cameras to do the shooting. "The film deals with terrorism in an indirect way. We just want to say that Egypt, which has given birth to great scientists like Ahmed Zoweil, might also nurture another Ayman al-Zawahri, given the changes in people's social circumstances. The film is a warning, so this doesn't happen," he commented.
