Commenting on the Friday detention of 250 Islamists in four Egyptian governorates, a lawyer for the banned Muslim Brotherhood said yesterday the group was expecting more detentions as they gear up for parliamentary elections. "This is an organised campaign against symbols of the Muslim Brotherhood who can lead in the election battle. It all started when the group said it would run in the parliamentary vote," Abdel Moneim Abdel Maqsoud, the group's lawyer, told The Egyptian Gazette. He added that this escalation against the Muslim Brotherhood would not intimidate it. "The group will keep up working on the street," he said. Egyptian security forces arrested 250 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest opposition group, whose members hold fifth of the legislature's seats. More than 1,000 others were briefly detained before the police released them, according to Abdel Maqsoud. The mid-term elections of the Shura Council (the Upper House of the Egyptian Parliament) will be held next June as the running procedures for them will start next month. Elections for the People's Assembly (the Lower House of the Parliament) will be held in November. "The detentions took place in at least five northern provinces of the country. Those held included would-be candidates in campaigning for legislative elections," the lawyer said. Security officials were not available for comment as no official statement from the Interior Ministry was released. "The campaign started in February by the detention of Mahmoud Ezzat, Essam el-Erian and 16 other senior Brotherhood members," Abdel Maqsoud said. Diaa Rashwan, an analyst at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said the detention indicated that the State still had concerns about the public influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. "The Brotherhood is very active ahead of polls on the grounds that they have a public base. This makes things difficult for the State in case free elections were held," Rashwan told this newspaper. He added that these detentions undermined all plans of the Islamists and gave the Government an upper hand in elections. "The Brotherhood exploited Israeli practices in Al-Aqsa (in occupied mosque) to tell the public we are here and our voice can be heard," Rashwan said. About 50 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, returning from Friday prayers, staged rallies in five major Egyptian cities to protest the decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex Muslim holy sites to the Jewish heritage. Protesters, carrying placards, gathered in front of mosques in Ismailia (near Suez Canal), Sharqiya, Menoufia, Dakahlia in Niger Delta, and Giza in southern Cairo. They chanted slogans against Israel and condemned the silence of Arabs towards “the Zionist aggression”.
