Egypt bids farewell to Nobel laureate Zewail

Egyptian authorities held a military funeral on Sunday for Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ahmed Zewail, who died last week.

President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and top government officials attended the funeral in a suburb east of Cairo.

His coffin was wrapped in the Egyptian flag and carried by a gun carriage drawn by horses mounted by soldiers.

Zewail died in the United States on Tuesday at the age of 70. He won the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his pioneering work in femtochemistry, the study of chemical reactions in ultra-short time scales.

Zewail was born in Egypt’s Nile Delta city of Damanhur, northwest of Cairo. He studied at Alexandria University, in the city where he grew up. He later moved to the United States and earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In 1982, Zewail became a naturalised US citizen. In 2009, he was appointed by US President Barack Obama as the first US science envoy to the Middle East.