Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
An injured Muslim Brotherhood supporter was captured by opposing protesters during clashes on Friday in Cairo.
CAIRO — The public prosecutor on Monday ordered the arrest of five
anti-Islamist political activists on charges of using social media to
incite violence against the Muslim Brotherhood. The order stirred accusations of a vendetta by the group’s close ally, President Mohamed Morsi.
Egyptians are already on guard against the possibility that their first
freely elected president may seek to become a new autocrat, and some
said they feared that the arrest warrants might be the first clear
example that Mr. Morsi’s government was using law enforcement as a
political tool to punish his critics.
A search of the online comments by several defendants found no messages
urging others to violence. Some, in fact, argued strongly against it.
But the arrests arose out of an attack by anti-Islamist activists on the
Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo on Friday night. As many as a
thousand of the group’s opponents arrived armed with sticks, knives and
at least a few guns, and they seemed intent on burning down the
headquarters.
A roughly equal number of Brotherhood supporters surrounded the building
to defend it, many bused in for the night, and for a time the two sides
clashed in the streets. Then an overwhelming force of riot police
officers separated the two sides, using tear gas to drive back the
attackers. By the end of the night several Brotherhood buses had been
burned. Health officials reported more than 100 injuries, although it
was impossible to confirm how many were on each side.
Afterward, Mr. Morsi sought to blame his political opponents for the
attack and vowed action against those who had incited the violence. In a
message on Twitter on Sunday, he castigated opposition leaders,
accusing them of “providing a political cover for violence.”
“Whoever is found to be involved in promoting violence through the media
will not escape punishment,” Mr. Morsi said in a short speech later on
Sunday. He also said he was prepared “to impose exceptional measures to
restore domestic order.”
Mr. Morsi’s political opponents have already denounced him since last
fall for picking his own public prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim, by using a
presidential decree to circumvent Egyptian law under which a president
cannot normally replace a public prosecutor. The appointment immediately
raised questions about the potential political use of the post.
On Monday, Mr. Morsi’s critics said Mr. Ibrahim appeared to be following
through on precisely the threat Mr. Morsi made just a day earlier. In a
statement, the public prosecutor said the five defendants singled out
for arrest had used Facebook and Twitter to urge others to “burn down
the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood and to murder some of its
members.”
A search Monday night of the defendants’ Facebook and Twitter accounts,
however, found no such statements in the period leading up to the
clashes on Friday night. Before the disturbance, one defendant, Alaa Abdel Fattah,
argued against violence, but he suggested in an online commentary on
Saturday that what he considered Mr. Morsi’s authoritarianism might make
a violent response legitimate. But Mr. Abdel Fatah, a prominent
activist previously imprisoned for months for challenging military rule,
was writing as part of an abstract, intellectual discussion, after the
fact.
The others named in the arrest warrant are the activists Ahmed Douma,
Kareem al-Shaer, Hazem Abdel Azeem and Ahmed al-Sahafy.
In television interviews on Monday night, several defendants accused the
public prosecutor of selectively targeting Mr. Morsi’s critics while
ignoring testimony, videos and other evidence that Islamists had also
used violence on their opponents that night as well as in street clashes
over the last four months. One video posted on the Internet, in fact,
captured footage of one of Mr. Morsi’s Islamist opponents beating Mr.
Douma outside the headquarters earlier last week.
The prosecutor is either “literally blind” or “complicit,” Mr. Douma
said in a television interview, contending that the prosecutor was “only
following orders.”
In response, Mr. Morsi’s supporters argued that earlier in the week the
prosecutor arrested three bodyguards of a Brotherhood leader, Khairat
el-Shater, on charges of using violence against the opposition
protesters.
Pakinam el-Sharkawy, a political adviser to Mr. Morsi, complained that
the president’s critics had applied a “double standard.” The president
did not prejudge this case and expected a fair trial, she said, but at
the same time the law must distinguish between political expression and
criminal violence. “Here,” Ms. Sharkawy said, “the law must have a just
sword capable of protecting rights, freedoms and social peace.”
