Cairo: The Muslim Brotherhood’s influential official Khairat Al Shater has refused to meet an international team in his prison to negotiate an end to the country’s crisis triggered by the army’s overthrow of Islamist president Mohammad Mursi, his daughter said Monday.
Aisha Khairat Al Shater added on her Facebook page that a team including US deputy secretary of state had sought to meet her father but he refused, telling them to see Mursi instead.
“History will witness that when Dr Mursi was in power, Khairat Al Shater was accused of being in control of the Interior Ministry and the entire country, but he could not protect himself when the police raided his house, opened fire, unfairly detained him and fabricated cases against him,” she said.
Al Shater, widely viewed as the Brotherhood’s key strategist and financier, was detained days after Mursi’s overthrow and is being held in the high-security Al Aqrab Prison south of Cairo.
A Cairo court is due to begin trying Al Shater on August 25 on charges of inciting deadly violence outside the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo on July 1.
The Interior Ministry has denied that foreign envoys sought to visit Al Shater. However, the state Middle East News Agency quoted what it termed as a well-informed source as saying that the meeting had been held with Al Shater in his prison late on Sunday and lasted for one hour. The agency did not give details.
Mursi’s Brotherhood has condemned the overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president as a coup and vowed to persist in mass protests until he is reinstated. Mursi is in the army’s custody and has been charged with conspiring with the Palestinian Islamist Hamas group to carry out “hostile acts” in Egypt.
The military-backed government has warned it will end two large protest vigils held by Mursi’s supporters in Cairo for more than a month now.
Several foreign dignitaries and officials have visited Egypt in the past few days attempting to defuse the crisis. Defence Minister Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, who led the overthrow of Mursi after massive protests against his rule, has promised not to use force in clearing the pro-Brotherhood sit-ins.
