CAIRO: Egyptian police broke up a financial planning meeting of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood and detained eight members of the Islamist group, the state news agency MENA reported. The meeting in a Cairo suburb on Thursday evening was between an official of the Muslim Brotherhood s central financing committee and seven committee members from the provinces, an Interior Ministry statement said.
The detentions are aimed to harass the group and cut it down to size especially after its widely felt omnipresence in society, Abdel Moneim Abul Futuh, a senior Brotherhood member, said on the group s Web site. The government policy now is eliminating members wherever they are. The Brotherhood is officially a banned organization but has about one fifth of the seats in parliament, held by members elected as independents, and operates openly within certain limits. The Egyptian police regularly detain its members and about 500 of them are now in prison, mostly without being charged. Over the last month, 58 members of the group had been detained in two previous arrest operations. Agencies
