Arrests can't scuttle poll plans, Brotherhood says

Cairo : The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has suggested that the arrests of high-ranking members on Monday is related to its support for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the upcoming parliamentary elections.

"This regime does not want a partner or a participant," in running the country, said spokesman Mohammad Morsi, describing the arrests as a continuation of the state's "pressure and marginalisation of the whole nation".

The second-ranking leader of the group, Mahmoud Ezzat, and two members of the its Guidance Council, Essam Al Erian and Abdul Rahman Al Bir, were arrested by police on Monday in a dawn sweep targeting members of the nation's most powerful opposition group.

A fourth member of the group's top-level decision-making body was not home when police raided his house. At least ten other members were also arrested in the provinces.

Morsi said the arrests wouldn't alter plans to participate in October's parliamentary elections.

Amnesty appeal

Police said those arrested face charges of engaging in banned political activity — a standard government charge used against the group.

The London-based Amnesty International said the detained men are considered "prisoners of conscience, detained solely for their peaceful political activities". The human rights watchdog called on the authorities to immediately and unconditionally release them.

The rights group also urged the UN Human Rights Council, which is to scrutinise Egypt's human rights record later this month, to give attention to the authorities' continued misuse of emergency powers that allow for arbitrary and prolonged detentions to quash opposition at home. The emergency laws have been in place for nearly three decades.

The Brotherhood was banned in 1954 but is occasionally tolerated by the state. Its candidates are allowed to run for parliament as independents and, in 2005, won 20 per cent of the seats, making them Egypt's largest opposition bloc.

"The regime wanted to express its opinion to the new leaders by punishing them and tightening the noose on the old ones," Abdul Jaleel Al Shernoubi, who runs the group's website, said.

The move comes just weeks after the movement selected a new supreme guide, Mohammad Badi, to great fanfare and media attention. He immediately embarked on a round of meetings with various intellectuals and opposition figures in the country.

Continuing crackdown

"In the last few days after Mohammad Badi's accession, there has been a kind of media offensive in which he made various declarations and met many people," said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist movements.

"I think [the arrests] are a kind of intimidation of them ... it is a kind of [government] offensive," he suggested, though he didn't expect the day-to-day work of the organisation to be affected in a big way.

Within a year of the Brotherhood's dramatic win of a fifth of the parliament seats in the 2005 election, the government launched a wide-ranging crackdown against the group, including the arrest of Khayrat Al Shater, the group's third-ranking member, who works as the chief strategist and financier.

In October, Egypt's interior minister, Habib Al Adeli, who runs the nation's powerful security apparatus, predicted the group would not repeat their election successes in the 2010 parliamentary contest.

"These arrests will not prevent the Brotherhood from the path it has chosen to achieve progress for the nation and it will continue its struggle through all available peaceful means to provide freedom and confront corruption and combat tyranny," the group said in a statement.