Muslim Brotherhood conspired with Hamas to kill prosecutor, Egypt claims

Egypt has accused exiled Muslim Brotherhood officials of conspiring with Gaza-based Hamas militants to assassinate the country’s chief prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, last year and have arrested several people in connection with the attack.

Barakat, one of the architects of Egypt’s crackdown on dissent, was killed by a car bomb in Cairo in June 2015. He was the most senior state official assassinated since the violence during the overthrow in mid-2013 of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack at the time. Egypt’s interior minister, Magdi Abdel Ghaffar, told a news conference on Sunday that the attack was ordered by Turkey-based leaders of Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement and coordinated with Hamas. He accused Hamas of providing training and explosives.

He said the authorities had arrested 48 members of a Muslim Brotherhood cell intending to undermine security through a series of attacks, and 14 of them had confessed to killing Barakat.

“Hamas trained, prepared and oversaw the implementation” of the attack, he said in an address broadcast by state and private media, which also aired confessions by some of the alleged perpetrators. “This is a very big conspiracy that started a long time ago and continued,” he said.

Judges and other senior officials have been targeted by radical Islamists since then-military chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi ousted Morsi after mass protests against his rule.

Sisi, who went on to win a presidential election the next year, banned the Muslim Brotherhood and jailed thousands of its followers.

Barakat was a figure of hate for Egypt’s opposition because he had, as chief prosecutor, enabled the detention of tens of thousands of government critics. Among the many controversial prosecutions he pursued, several resulted in death sentences for hundreds of alleged supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rights campaigners also accused Barakat of bowing to police pressure to prolong the pre-trial detention of dissidents, even when there was little evidence.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Egypt’s accusations made on Sunday were “baseless and not in harmony with the efforts being exerted to develop the relationship between Hamas and Cairo”.