Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
At an airport in Cairo, Egyptian military and police personnel carried coffins with the bodies of police officers who were killed near Rafah in the northern Sinai.
CAIRO — The Egyptian police arrested the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood early on Tuesday hours after a court ordered the release of former President Hosni Mubarak, twin developments that offered a measure of how far and how quickly the tumult shaking Egypt in recent days and weeks has upended the tenuous political order still evolving after the revolution of 2011.
For the first time since Mr. Mubarak was overthrown two and half years ago, it was conceivable he might go free, even as his democratically elected successor, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, remained in detention by the military that ousted him in early July and installed an interim government.
In a kind of counterpoint, the arrest of Mohamed Badie, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, showed the severity of the crackdown on Islamist forces that has left hundreds dead. A private television network that supports the military leadership broadcast footage of the Islamist leader in custody.
His incarceration, which followed the death of a son, Ammar, in clashes on Friday, was apparently designed to further deflate the Brotherhood’s resolve to maintain its challenge to the military-backed government with street protests clamoring for Mr. Morsi’s release.
Mr. Badie was arrested in an apartment in the northeastern Nasr City neighborhood of Cairo, news reports said, close to a mosque at the center of a six-week sit-in by Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi at a protest camp that the security forces dispersed with gunfire and tear gas last Wednesday. Raids on that camp and another near Cairo University killed hundreds, sparking violent clashes. In recent days the protests have seemed less intense.
Charged with incitement to murder, Mr. Badie and his two deputies face trial later this month.
His arrest, made known in the early hours, came as Egyptians struggled to absorb the notion that Mr. Mubarak, deposed as reviled despot in February 2011, might be freed. Few legal analysts thought a release was likely, at least in the coming weeks. But under the government installed last month by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, they say, it is no longer a foregone conclusion that prosecutors will continue to find reasons to detain the former autocrat.
Some analysts said that even the possibility of Mr. Mubarak’s release, previously unthinkable, provided another sign of the return of his authoritarian style of government.
Since the ouster of Mr. Morsi, the interim government has brought back not only prominent faces of the Mubarak era but signature elements of that autocratic state, including an “emergency law” removing the right to a trial and curbs on police abuse, the appointment of generals as governors across the provinces and moves to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood again as a terrorist threat.
The police scarcely bothered to offer a credible explanation for the deaths of three dozen Morsi supporters in custody over the weekend. After repeatedly shifting stories, they ultimately said the detainees had suffocated from tear gas during a failed escape attempt. But photographs taken at the morgue on Monday showed that at least two had been badly burned from the shoulders up and that others bore evidence of torture.
Security officers have a new bounce in their step. They are again pulling men from their cars at checkpoints for interrogation because they have beards and dealing out arbitrary beatings with a sense of impunity — Mubarak-era hallmarks that had receded in recent years. Among civilians, even those outside the Muslim Brotherhood, fear of the police is growing.
Badr Abdelatty, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, denied any resemblance between the new government and Mr. Mubarak’s. “The emergency law is just for one month and for one objective: fighting terrorism,” he said, using the term that the new government applies to both civil disobedience and acts of violence by Islamist opponents of the military takeover. “The only way to fight terrorism is to apply the rule of law, and some emergency measures for just one month, to bring back law and order.”
More than 1,000 Brotherhood members and other supporters of Mr. Morsi have died since Wednesday in a police crackdown, and his ouster has set off a wave of retaliatory violence from his supporters, mainly targeting churches around the country and security forces in the relatively lawless northern Sinai. In the latest episode there, militants killed 25 police officers and wounded 3 others on Monday in an attack on their minibuses. Officials said the bodies were found face down with bound hands, evidently assassinated.
Egyptian Police Arrest Spiritual Leader of Muslim Brotherhood
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