A senior leader of Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group was convicted on terror charges and sentenced to life in prison, the country’s state-owned news agency reported.

According to the Middle East News Agency, a Cairo court found Mahmoud Ezzat, the acting supreme guide of the country’s oldest Islamist organisation, guilty of terror acts that followed the 2013 military overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi.

Last summer, 76-year-old Ezzat was arrested after police found him hiding in an apartment on the outskirts of Cairo.

According to authorities at the time, a search of the apartment uncovered computers and mobile phones with encrypted software that allowed Ezzat to communicate with group members in Egypt and abroad.

Documents with “destructive plans” were also found, police said.

Ezzat had been at large since the summer of 2013, after the military removed Mr Morsi, who hailed from Brotherhood ranks.

Mr Morsi’s short-lived rule proved divisive and provoked mass protests nationwide.

Mr Morsi died after collapsing in court during one of his trials in June 2019.

Ezzat was believed to have fled the country along with many of the group’s leaders following the crackdown on their organisation.

He was named the group’s acting leader in August 2013.

He was convicted of several terror-related crimes and sentenced twice to death in absentia.

Following his arrest, he was retried, as Egyptian law dictates.

Credit: PA News

Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies, said on Monday he had engaged in “sex games” with two women in France who accuse him of rape, but said the “submissive-dominant” relationships were consensual.

It is the first time in the near one-year long case that the Oxford University professor, who has taken a leave of absence from the British institution, admits to having had sexual relations with the plaintiffs.

“He can finally speak freely, and he’s relieved,” his lawyer, Emmanuel Marsigny, told reporters after Ramadan, the grandson of an Islamist thinker who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, was heard by investigators in Paris.

Ramadan faced one of the accusers, named only as “Christelle”, during a 10-hour confrontation on September 18.

The woman, an Islam convert who suffers from disabilities arising from a car accident, says Ramadan raped her in October 2009 in a hotel room in Lyon, southeastern France.

Ramadan said he had “relations akin to sex games of the submissive-dominant kind, but always in a consensual and knowing way,” his lawyer said.

“It has been one year now that Mr Ramadan’s defendants have been playing tricks to save his cause. But the truth is that he lied from the beginning of this case by denying he had sexual relations and that it took one year to confess,” Jonas Haddad, a lawyer for the other plantiff, Henda Ayari, told Reuters.

“Will it take him another year to confess the rest?” he said.

Ramadan’s lawyer said a series of text messages found in the two women’s mobile phones showed the relations were consensual. He filed a request for Ramadan, in custody since he was notified of the French investigation on February 2, to be freed.

Married with four children, Ramadan is a grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna. He enjoys a substantial following among young Muslims and has challenged French restrictions on wearing veils.

He also faces a third criminal complaint for rape by a Swiss woman in Geneva.

Saudi Arabia is revamping its education curriculum to eradicate any trace of Muslim Brotherhood influence and will dismiss anyone working in the sector who sympathises with the banned group, the education minister said.

Promoting a more moderate form of Islam is one of the promises made by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman under plans to modernise the deeply conservative Muslim kingdom.

The education ministry is working to “combat extremist ideologies by reviewing school curricula and books to ensure they do not reflect the banned Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda,” Ahmed bin Mohammed al-Isa said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

It would “ban such books from schools and universities and remove those who sympathise with the group or its ideology from their posts,” he added.

In September, a large Saudi public university announced it would dismiss employees suspected of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, adding to concerns that the government is clamping down on its critics in academia and beyond.

Earlier this month, Crown Prince Mohammed told CBS in an interview that Saudi schools have been “invaded” by elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been designated by Saudi Arabia as a terrorist organisation along with other militant groups such as al Qaeda and Islamic State.

INTERNAL THREAT

The young crown prince has already taken some steps to loosen Saudi Arabia’s ultra-strict social restrictions, scaling back the role of religious morality police, permitting public concerts and announcing plans to allow women to drive.

The ruling Al Saud family has always regarded Islamist groups as a major internal threat to its rule over a country where appeals to religious sentiment resonate deeply and an al Qaeda campaign a decade ago killed hundreds.

Since the kingdom’s founding, the Al Saud have enjoyed a close alliance with clerics of the ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Islam who have espoused a political philosophy that demands obedience to the ruler.

By contrast the Brotherhood advances an active political doctrine urging revolutionary action.

A political Islamist organisation founded in Egypt nearly a century ago, the Muslim Brotherhood says it is committed to peaceful activism and reform through elections, and its adherents span the region, holding elected office in Arab countries from Tunisia to Jordan.

Brotherhood members fleeing repression in Egypt, Syria and Iraq half a century ago took shelter in Saudi Arabia, some taking up roles in the kingdom’s education system and helping to establish the Sahwa or “Awakening” movement which agitated in the 1990s for democracy.

The Sahwa mostly fizzled, with some activists arrested and others coaxed into conformity, though admirers and its appeal lingered.

A vigil takes place in Cairo to remember those who lost their lives in a bombing at the city’s largest Coptic cathedral last Sunday (December 11).

Islamic State claimed responsibility on Tuesday for a suicide bombing that killed at least 25 people.

The militant group said in a statement carried by its news agency Amaq that a suicide bomber whom it identified as Abu Abdallah al-Masri had detonated his explosive belt inside the church.

“Every infidel and apostate in Egypt and everywhere should know that our war … continues,” it said.

The Interior Ministry identified the bomber on Monday as 22-year-old student Mahmoud Shafik Mohammed Mostafa, and said he was a supporter of the banned Muslim Brotherhood political movement who had joined a militant cell while on the run from police.

In an interview with Reuters, Mostafa’s mother said he had been sexually abused in police custody in 2014, but that she had seen no sign that he had been radicalised.

In addition to the dead, at least 49 people were wounded when the bomb went off in a chapel adjoining St Mark’s Cathedral, Cairo’s largest church and seat of the Coptic Christian papacy.