Egypt inquiry wants to meet jailed Brotherhood leaders

The head of an Egyptian fact-finding commission into the events that followed last year’s ouster of elected president Mohamed Morsi saidWednesday that he was ready to meet imprisoned leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood – the group from which Morsi hails – to hear their account of events.

Fouad Abdel-Moneim Riyad said he was ready to meet Brotherhood leaders – including group leader Mohamed Badie and Mohamed al-Beltagi, head of the group’s political party in Cairo – to hear their version of events, including the bloody dispersal in August of last year of a pro-Morsi sit-in in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square.

“We are ready to go to the prisons and meet the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who led the [Rabaa al-Adawiya] sit-in,” Riyad told Anadolu Agency.

Morsi supporters had staged a sit-in in eastern Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square to protest the elected president’s ouster by the military on July 3following protests against his government.

The violent dispersal of the sit-in, along with another sit-in in Giza’s Nahda Square, left 632 people, including eight policemen, dead, according to the state-run National Council for Human Rights.

Other local and international human rights groups, however, said fatalities from the sit-in dispersal had exceeded 1,000.

Riyad stressed the importance of hearing the accounts of both Badie and al-Beltagi in their capacity as sit-in organizers.

He says he filed an official request to meet the two men two weeks ago.

“Some members of the commission and I went to their prison to meet them, but they refused [to see us],” Riyad said of the two Brotherhood leaders.

“We still stick to our demand to meet them as part of our efforts to listen to everybody,” he added.

He said he had filed a request for meeting imprisoned Islamist leaders before, including the brother of Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahri.

“Muslim Brotherhood leaders, however, refused to meet us,” Riyad said.

He said commission members were also ready to meet Muslim Brotherhood leaders outside Egypt, noting that these leaders had refused to provide their account of events.

The fact-finding commission was formed by presidential decree last December with the stated aim of collecting information and evidence on events that followed the June 30 protests that precipitated Morsi’s ouster.

The commission is expected to investigate other post-June 30 events, such as attacks on churches; university riots; assassinations and attempted assassinations; and attempts to impede Suez Canal traffic.

Riyad said his commission would not set a date for providing the presidency with its report on these events until it had collected all the necessary data.

The mandate of Riyad’s commission is set to expire on September 21.