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Egypt says Hamas helped carry out assassination of public prosecutor
Egypt yesterday announced that it had made 14 arrests over last year’s assassination of the country’s state prosecutor, accusing Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood of conspiring to carry out the attack.
64-year-old Public Prosecutor Hisham Barakat was killed when an explosion struck his motorcade in Cairo last June. He is the most senior Egyptian official to be killed since Islamist groups began to launch attacks against officials associated with Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government, the army and security forces. Al-Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 and his authority has since been targeted by Islamist terror groups.
Most notably, in the Sinai Peninsula which borders Israel, the Sinai Province terror group, affiliated to ISIS has waged arms against the al-Sisi regime, persistently attacking Egyptian military forces in Sinai and inflicting serious casualties. Sinai Province has also made clear that it is committed to attacking Israel and last year fired Grad rockets into Israel.
Egypt’s government has repeatedly accused Hamas of directly aiding Sinai Province and has clamped down hard on smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip-Sinai border, which Cairo says are used to routinely smuggle weapons and fighters into Sinai. Meanwhile, another Hamas operative was killed last week in a tunnel collapse near Israel’s border, as Hamas continues to rebuild its network of attack tunnels.
Yesterday, Egypt’s Interior Minister, Magdi Abdel Ghaffar said that Barakat’s murder had been ordered by Muslim Brotherhood figures in Turkey, but that “Hamas trained, prepared and oversaw the implementation” of the attack. 14 people were arrested and apparently confessed to their part in the killing, with some reportedly having said that they received training in firearms and bomb-making by Hamas. Ghaffar added that, “This is a very big conspiracy that started a long time ago and continued.”
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that Egypt’s accusations were “baseless.” However, Cairo’s claims would appear to strike a blow to what Hamas official Oasma Hamdan last week described as growing relations between Hamas and Egypt.