Cairo, 20 June (AKI) - Founders and leaders of the Egyptian radical Islamic group Jamaa al-Islamiya will soon set up a website to provide an update on the current status of the organisation and on future prospects of jihad or holy war, Saudi Arabian daily al-Watan reported on Tuesday. The new website will explain why the historical leaders of the Jamaa al-Islamiya, who had been jailed, chose to leave the path of violence, obtaining in many cases their release. It will feature texts reflecting the organisation's new 'peaceful' line. | And they say torture is ineffective, hah! |
According to al-Watan, Jamaa al-Islamiya will also provide a new account of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, in which the organisation was involved, explaining why its current leaders regard Sadat's killing a mistake. | "Ok, it was a mistake, we were bad. Now, can you get THAT away from me?" |
The website's content will also seek to promote dialogue and cooperation with the Christian-Coptic minority of Egypt. | Must have used ViseGrips to squeeze that one in |
Jamaa al-Islamiya was founded in the 1970s when the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership decided to renounce violence, and was originally an umbrella organisation for militant university student groups. It subsequently moved from university campuses to poor and deprived neighbourhoods of Egyptian cities and its leaders became younger and less educated. Al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was also among the founders of Jamaa al-Islamiya in the 1970s.
In the 1990s, the organisation carried out an extended campaign of violence, from murders and attempted murders of prominent writers and intellectuals, to the repeated targeting of tourists and foreigners. Jamaa al-Islamiya's record of terror includes the 1997 attack at the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor - northern Egypt -, in which a band of six men machine-gunned and hacked to death with knives 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians. Following the 1997 attack, the Egyptian government cracked down hard against Jamaa Islamiya, above all to saveguard tourism, one of Egypt's main earners.
The group declared a ceasefire in 1999 and some of its imprisoned leaders went on to renounce violence. Following the final decision by many jailed leaders to reject violence and draw their inspiration from peaceful principles, some 900 Jamaa al-Islamiya's members who had been arrested over the previous 20 years, including founder Najeh Ibrahim, were released in April 2006. |