Cairo: Egypt’s Islamist president-elect Mohammad Mursi has sought to allay fears among the security agencies involved in oppressing Islamists under the 30-year rule of his deposed predecessor Hosni Mubarak.
Mursi, detained twice by Mubarak’s police, sent a reassuring message to security personnel in his first address following his election win at the weekend that he would not “take revenge” on the police over Mubarak-era oppression. He repeated the message two days later.
“I have not come to settle scores,” Mursi, an engineering professor, said at an hour-meeting with Interior Minister Mohammad Ebrahim and security chiefs this week.
“I refuse the term ‘police purge’ in revamping the police, who represent a national institution full of honest people,” he was quoted as adding.
Many of Islamist lawmakers in the now-disbanded parliament have repeatedly called for “purging” police of senior aides who served under Mubarak’s notorious former interior minister Habib Al Adli.
Mursi, expected to take the oath of office as Egypt’s first civilian election president on Saturday,told the security officials he would “open a new page” with the police and that their institution would be restructured along rules to be laid down by experts among them.
During the meeting, Mursi recognised a top security official and said he had once detained him, reported local media. The unnamed official looked worried about the gesture, added the media.
Mursi was jailed for seven months in 2006 in an anti-Mubarak protest. He was locked up in prison outside Cairo along with more than 30 senior members of his group, the Muslim Brotherhood, on January 28, 2011, i.e. three days after the revolt that forced Mubarak out of power.
Days later,Mursi was freed by local people after a sudden collapse of the police system in Egypt.
Despite his reassuring remarks, senior police officers, especially those who served in the much-hated State Security Service that was disbanded after Mubarak’s removal, are still sceptical. They expect the Islamist leader to investigate their involvement in torturing Islamists under Mubarak, reported the independent newspaper Al Shorouk on Wednesday, citing sources inside the Interior Ministry.
