Egypt said that a raid in Cairo had netted the outlawed movement’s acting leader, Mahmoud Ezzat, who was thought to have fled abroad.
Egypt’s interior ministry said Friday that a security services raid on a Cairo apartment had captured Mahmoud Ezzat, the acting leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, who had been on the run for seven years. The capture of Mr. Ezzat,76, was the rare arrest of a senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest and largest political movement, which has been crushed by a fierce wave of state-led repression in recent years. Since the military takeover that ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, most Muslim Brotherhood leaders have been cast into the country’s crowded maximum-security prisons or forced into exile. Mr. Ezzat was the exception. A deputy to the Brotherhood’s leader, Mohammed Badie, Mr. Ezzat was appointed as an acting leader in 2013 after Mr. Badie was arrested. He promptly vanished from public view, and many Egyptians supposed he had fled to Turkey, which is home to many exiled Brotherhood leaders and media outlets. Instead, he was in Egypt for at least some of that time. In the statement issued on Friday, the authorities said he had been captured by officers from the National Security Agency at an apartment used by the Brotherhood in the Fifth Settlement, an upmarket district of eastern Cairo close to the American University in Cairo.
