CAIRO: The outlawed Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood group is heading towards full disintegration after the recent arrest of its Acting Supreme Guide Mahmoud Ezzat and the loss of many of its top leaders, Egyptian experts said.
The experts also confirmed that the Egyptian security services have fully controlled the banned group, whose most leaders have been in jail since the army ousted late Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, also a top leader of the group, in 2013 after mass protests against his one-year rule.
Egyptian authorities announced on Friday that they have arrested the acting supreme guide of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group Mahmoud Ezzat in Cairo. “Ezzat, head of the Brotherhood’s International Organization, was arrested in an apartment in New Cairo’s fifth settlement neighborhood,” the interior ministry said in statement.
The group interim leader has founded an armed wing that carried out major terrorist operations in Egypt since June 30, 2013, according to Egyptian authorities.
The terrorist operations included the assassination of the former general prosecutor Hisham Barakat in 2015, police Colonel Wael Tahoon in 2015, top-ranked army officer Adel Ragei in 2016, and the attempted assassination of the general prosecutor’s former aide Zakaria Abdel-Azim in 2016.
Ezzat has also orchestrated the deadly car blast outside the country’s national cancer hospital in 2019 that killed 20 people in the capital Cairo.
Promoted as a member of the group’s guidance bureau in 1981, Ezzat has been sentenced in absentia for a life term on accusations of espionage with the Palestinian Hamas movement. The 76-year-old leader was named the group’s acting supreme guide in August 2013, replacing Mohamed Badie who currently serves life sentences over violence charges. “There is no doubt that the arrest of Ezzat is a heavy blow to the Muslim Brotherhood, because he is one of its historical leaders, and he has been the supervisor of all armed activities and terrorist acts carried out by the group since 2013,” Khaled Okasha, Director of the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies, told Xinhua. Okasha, a former police brigadier general, added that Ezzat was one of the founders of armed movements affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Hasm, the Revolutionary Brigade, and Revolutionary Punishment.
