Region | Egypt
Opposition flays Mubarak's 'scandalous' campaigning
Opposition leaders made the accusation that government institutions are being used to ensure that President Hosni Mubarak, 77, wins for the fifth straight term in the first multi-candidate contest after governing Egypt for 24 years.
- By Duraid Al Baik, Foreign Editor
- Published: 23:31 May 3, 2009
Three of Egypt's 10 presidential hopefuls are fighting it out for the top slot as campaigning peaked for Wednesday's poll.
Opposition leaders made the accusation that government institutions are being used to ensure that President Hosni Mubarak, 77, wins for the fifth straight term in the first multi-candidate contest after governing Egypt for 24 years.
The New Wafd party yesterday called the president's campaigners scandalous while three journalists of the Al Ghad daily newspaper filed a case against the Mubarak and Interior Minister Habib Al Adli over irregularities in campaigning.
Dr Numan Juma, the Chairman of New Wafd, and Ayman Nour, Editor-in-Chief of Al Ghad and the chairman of the party of the same name, are also running for the president's post.
Dr Mohammad Abasiri, vice-president of New Wafd, told Gulf News that the Ministry of Interior has denied the party a full list of electorates, which contains the names of about 35 million people eligible to vote on Wednesday.
"We discovered that Hosni Mubarak's campaign co-mmittee has distributed a number of their voters with special identification cards to be used by voters on the day of election. These cards are using information from the electoral list of the Ministry of Interior ... but the same authority had earlier told us that it would not be able to provide our party with the list before November," Dr Abasiri said.
"The campaign committee of Al Wafd Party is in the need of such a list before the day of election ... we don't need it afterwards. They are abusing the power entrusted to them by the nation to organise their campaign and manipulate the result of the vote while trying to undermine other contesters," he said.
Dr Abasiri said the party has lodged a complaint with the Election Higher Committee, requesting an immediate intervention to force the ministry to abide by the party's demand.
Three Al Ghad journalists Jalal Al Gandour, Mohammad Fawzi and Ezz Al Najjar have meanwhile filed a case against Mubarak and Al Adli for sabotaging the campaign of Nour.
The journalists, including a photographer, were on their way back from one of Nour's poll campaigns in Aswan, southern Egypt, when police raided the train they were travelling in and detained them for more than 12 hours.
Al Gandour told Gulf News that they were char-ged with using the seats in their cabin to sleep during the long journey.
"I bought two tickets for myself before boarding the train in Aswan ... my colleagues also did the same. All of us were planning to sleep during the 15-hour journey to Cairo," he said.
"But an inspector came and told us that we could not lie down on the seats ... we showed him two tickets for each one of us and also showed our IDs ... The inspector then called the policeman on board, who called up the nearest police station in Kommbo village and a team from there came to arrest us."
According to Al Gandour, during the seven-hour que-stioning at the Kommbo police station, the men blasted Ayman Nour and also insulted them.
"The miserable way in which police treated us suggests that the whole issue was a ploy to delay the publication of the reports about the successful campaign of Nour in Aswan," he said.
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