CAIRO (Reuters)
Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood vowed on Wednesday to contest local council elections due in April from behind bars, and security forces detained 41 more Brotherhood Islamists ahead of the vote.
The Brotherhood said those detained were picked up in sweeps coinciding with a 10-day registration period for candidates wishing to take part in the elections. Most of the detainees were likely candidates in the April 8 vote, it said.
"These detainees have started taking the necessary legal steps to complete the papers and to proceed with nomination procedures from behind bars," the Brotherhood's deputy leader Mohamed Habib said in a statement, complaining of an arrests campaign that was "targeting Brotherhood candidates in all provinces".
While Habib did not say how many candidates would attempt to enter the elections from jail, the Brotherhood's Ikhwanweb Web site named four detainees who it said had formally announced their intent to do so including Ahmed Rami, a board member in the pharmacists' syndicate.
Egypt stepped up an arrests campaign in recent weeks against the Brotherhood, Egypt's strongest opposition force. Egypt has detained more than 350 Brotherhood members since mid-February and is holding a total of more than 730, the group says.
The local councils where seats are at stake in the April vote hold little real power, but seats could be important nationally if the Brotherhood wants to qualify to field an independent candidate for the presidency in the future.
Under a constitutional amendment passed in 2005, independent candidates for the presidency need endorsements from 140 members of local councils to run, in addition to support from members of the upper and lower houses of parliament.
Egyptian security sources confirmed Wednesday's arrests, but put the number held at 26. They said the men were accused of belonging to a banned group and holding secret anti-government meetings.
The Brotherhood seeks an Islamic state through non-violent, democratic means. It holds a fifth of the seats in the lower house of parliament through members elected as independents to circumvent a decades-old ban.
Egypt postponed local council elections for two years in 2006 after the Brotherhood performed better than expected in a parliamentary election in 2005. |
