Egyptian police break up Islamist leaders meeting

CAIRO, Aug 17 (Reuters) Egyptian police broke up a leadership meeting of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood today and took away 20 senior members, including political department chief Essam el-Erian, a Brotherhood member said.

Police have taken the participants to their homes so they can help with searches, said Abelmoneim Mahmoud, who acts as a spokesman for the Islamist movement.

The Egyptian government calls the Muslim Brotherhood an illegal organisation and regularly detains groups of members without charge, often for months at a time.

But members of the group hold one fifth of the seats in parliament, and the Brotherhood has an office open in Cairo and can operate within limits.

Mahmoud said the 20 men held today included Mahmoud Hussein, a member of the small Guidance Office, which acts as an executive committee for the organisation.

The leaders were gathered today evening at the home of businessman Nabil Mukbil in the west Cairo suburb of Muhandiseen when police arrived and broke up the meeting.

Most of them were from the Cairo area but seven had come from more distant provinces of Egypt, Mahmoud said.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said he had no comment on reports of the arrests.

Mohamed Habib, the deputy leader of the Brotherhood, told Reuters that the crackdown was timed to harass the group as it prepares to announce on September 1 the programme of a political party which it would like to establish.

Egyptian law bans parties based on religion, a ban now enshrined in a constitutional amendment passed this year.

Close to 400 members of the Brotherhood are now in detention, most of them without charges or trial, after a crackdown which began in December last year.

Essam el-Erian, who has been in and out of detention for more than 15 years as a result of his Brotherhood activities, missed a holiday in Turkey today because immigration officials at Cairo airport stopped him from travelling.

It was the third time in four months that Erian, a medical doctor, has tried and failed to pass through Cairo airport to travel abroad.

He was part of a group of 27 doctors going to Turkey today morning on a vacation organised by the Doctors Syndicate, of which Erian has been a senior official.

He told Reuters the syndicate had given the authorities a list of the doctors in the group and no one had objected to his name. ''I no longer ask (if they will let me travel) because it has become silly, that one should have to ask for one's natural right,'' he added.

Reuters SZ VP0205