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Egypt's ministry accuses detained engineers of causing power outage crisis

September 12, 2014 at 3:56 pm

The chairman of the Egyptian Electric Holding Company accused opponents of the military-backed authorities of orchestrating the massive power outages that hit the country recently.

He has gone onto to relegate a number of senior employees at Aswan High Dam to other positions under the pretext that they may have caused the recent power cuts. It has since transpired that the employees were in jail at the time the crisis occurred.

Ossama Ahmed Hassanein the chairman of Aswan’s Engineers Syndicate and a Brotherhood leader in the city has been in jail for 10 months. He previously served as the general manager of computer and hardware maintenance at Aswan’s electricity plant. Yet, the chairman of the holding company moved him to the position of senior engineer in the same place as of February 23.

Another engineer, Hatem Ahmed Shafei, who served as senior maintenance engineer at Aswan’s First Electricity Plant, has been transferred to another post in the technical affairs division in the same department. This is despite the fact that he had been detained in Qena prison for three months before being released recently.

A third engineer, Mohamed Hussein Ibrahim, who has also been detained in Qena prison since November but has been acquitted earlier this month after nine months in jail, was relegated to a another position in the same company.

Likewise, Al-Sayed Sobhy Saad, director of technical monitoring, has been moved to another position after spending eight months in jail and then being acquitted by a recent court order.

A fifth employee has been moved to a lower position in the High Dam power division after being detained for six months and then later released for medical reasons.