MB News
April 13, 2007
14 minutes read

9 Behera MBs Detained, House of MB Blogger Raided

Egyptian security forces detained nine Muslim Brotherhood leaders and raided the house of a journalist blogger working in the MB official web site.

State security forces in El-Behera detained nine Muslim Brotherhood leaders while they were in the hose of engineer Khaled Al Qamhawi in the city of Damanhur, on Thursday evening April, 12, 2007. A huge numbers of security forces stormed into Al Qamhawi’s house at 6.30PM while they were eating a fast breaking meal and arrested them. They were sent to the Damanhur’s State Security Police headquarters and they haven’t appeared before the prosecution so far.

The detainees are:

Eng. Khaled Al Qamhawi, a businessman from Damanhur
Eng. Osama Solaiman, a businessman from Damanhur
Ehab Al-Sayyed, former Secretary-General of the bar association in Damanhur
Mahdi Qarsham, Veterinary medicine professor from Edfina, Kafr Al-Dawar
Ahmed Abul Fattouh, a doctor from Mahmoudiya
Fawzi Ashour, a doctor from Mahmoudiya
Mahmoud Gaballah, a lawyer from Mahmoudiya
Hassan Saif Al Nasr, a school principal from Dalangat
Abdul Salam Hegazi, a merchant from Itay Al Barud .

The state security forces detained also students Mohamed Al Qamhawi, son of Khaled Al Qamhawi, and his colleague Ahmed Khamis Shama in front of Al Qamhawi’s house; they stormed into the houses of the nine detainees and searched them and disheveled their furniture in addition to taking some of the belongings of the detainees.

MB Detentions Not To Homeland Interest

For his part, Dr. Gamal Heshmat, a Muslim Brotherhood leader in El Behera and former MP, Brotherhood group, confirmed that the Egyptian security services aim at distorting the image of the group; he stressed that all these detentions aren’t to the national interest of the country.

Heshmat added in a statement to Ikhwanweb that those detainees are iconic figures; they are university professor, board members, ex-union an municipality members, and businessmen who are well-known for their honesty; “who benefits from arresting these prominent figures at a time in which our homeland seeks closing ranks and union?!” wondered Heshmat.

Heshmat added that the Egyptian regime is leading the country to a real tragedy with its continuous sweeps of arrests against Muslim Brotherhood leaders and activists.

House of MB Blogger Raided

In a related context, the State Security Police forces raided on Friday morning the hose of the Egyptian blogger media personality, Abdul Moneim Mahmoud, a journalist in the Muslim Brotherhood’s English language official website and correspondent of the Cairo-based British Hewar channel; he was not in the house when the raid occurred.

Abdul Moneim Mahmoud, dubbed Muslim Brotherhood Reuters among journalists and political activists, is one of the most prominent MB youth concerned with media; he is one of those who started Muslim Brotherhood’s blogging; he attracted the attention of many bloggers to this arena in on the cyberspace; his weblog, http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com/, is one of the prominent Arab weblogs at the time being.

Abd Al-Moneim was a leader of Egyptian student movement in Alexandria University; he was detained several times due to his student activities, the latest of which was early 2005 among the secretariat of the Muslim Brotherhood’s student section.

Abd Al-Moneim’s activity has been prominent during the last period; he appeared as a correspondent for Al-Hewar Satellite channel and he covered many of the Egyptian activities related to freedoms; he is also a journalist in www.ikhwanweb.com that helped him to meet a big number of Western researchers and scholars concerned with the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and campaign against it.

His speech about the torture he faced under the State Security Police during the Cairo-based fifth conference for the international campaign against imperialism, had a wide resonance in the Egyptian media.