CAIRO: Seven Egyptian presidential candidates secretly met Tuesday evening. The meeting was attended by Hisham el-Bastawisi, an Egyptian judge and the vice president of the Egyptian Court of Cassation; Mohammad Salim Al-Awa, an Egyptian Islamist intellectual and former Secretary General of the International Union for Muslim Scholars; Mohamed el-Baradei, Former Secretary-General of the U.N.'s IAEA; Amr Moussa, Former Secretary-General of the Arab League; Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an Egyptian Scholar and Islamic Intellectual; Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, Secretary-General of the Arab Medical Union, and Hamdeen Sabbahi, leader of the opposition party al-Karama. The candidates' managers also attended the two-hour meeting. The nominees did not reveal the details of the meeting, which was called for by independent activists such as Wael Ghoneim, a Google executive based in Dubai, according to a source. Photos of the meeting were published on social networking websites Twitter and Facebook. The source added that the meeting was not held in any headquarters of the nominees but was held at an unaffiliated location in the Giza neighborhood of Mohandiseen. Sabbahi, and Aboul Fotouh attended the candidates' meeting rather than their earlier scheduled meeting with visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
