Alwaght- Egyptian security forces have arrested a retired general after denying him permission to run in presidential elections in March.
Sami Anan was the last challenger seen as a potential threat to President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, himself a former military chief, whose re-election is fait accompli.
The arrest of Anan, a former member of Egypt’s supreme military council for armed forces, appears to be a calculated move to push him out of the race. Earlier a declaration by the military accused him of election violations and said he would be “summoned for interrogation in front of specialized personnel”.
Mahmoud Refaat, a spokesman for Anan’s campaign abroad, said: “I hold the regime of Abdel Fatah El-Sisi entirely responsible for his wellbeing. Yesterday 30 members of campaign were also arrested as well as some of their family members. It’s not known where any of them are being held.”
Anan is the second former high-ranking official to be prevented from running against Sisi, who declared he would run for a second term late last week.
Anan previously stated he wished to save Egypt from “wrong policies”, and was seen as a favorite to challenge Sisi on the campaign trail, even attracting support from members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. He later made the controversial choice to appoint the country’s former top auditor Hisham Geneina as one of his two running mates. Geneina was sentenced to a year in prison in 2016 after accusing the Egyptian government of rampant corruption costing the country billions of dollars.
El-Sisi became famous in 2013 after leading the army’s ouster of his Muslim Brotherhood predecessor Mohamed Mursi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president. While couching it as a war on terrorism, he oversaw a sweeping crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood that left hundreds of the movement’s members dead and thousands more imprisoned. As the crackdown expanded to activists and other dissenters, critics argued el-Sisi practically creating a police state which now guarantees him ‘victory’ in the coming elections.
