CAIRO: Egypt will submit a motion to the Lebanese government in which it accuses certain Lebanese official bodies of conspiring with the Hezbollah cell that was allegedly operating in Egypt.
According to local and regional reports, Egypt has discovered through its investigation of suspects charged with operating a Hezbollah cell on it soil that a level of cooperation was given by certain official Lebanese bodies in providing paperwork for the alleged ringleader, Samy Hany Shihab.
An example of this is the presence of original Lebanese certification of false documents; specifically that Shihab possessed a legal Lebanese passport under an alias, which Egypt believes indicates a level of cooperation within Lebanon’s official institutions.
Egyptian authorities insist that Shihab’s real name is Mohamed Yousef Mansour, a claim denied by Shihab’s lawyer Montasser Al-Zayat to Daily News Egypt.
Egypt has accused 49 people, among them Lebanese, Palestinians and Egyptians belonging to a cell taking orders from Hezbollah. State security investigators have 25 of them in custody and are conducting searches for the rest. One who is not in custody is Hezbollah official Mohamed Qublan who is being charged in absentia.
Interrogations with the 25 suspects in custody ended Monday morning and 11 of them have been moved from state security locations to public prisons after a request from the defense team, which accused their incarceration in state security locations of being unlawful detention.
Additionally, the State Security Prosecutor Hisham Badawy decided to refer the detainees to the forensic department to ascertain if they had been tortured during their initial detention, a charge the defense team leveled on the basis of the testimony of one of the detainees who is now apparently hemiplegic.
Lawyer for a number of the detainees, Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maqsoud, filed a motion at the State Council Sunday against Interior Minister Habib Al-Adly and the State Security Public Prosecutor for unlawful detention of the suspects.
In the motion Abdel-Maqsoud argued that the detainees were held in State Security headquarters for four months since their arrest last November until the case was revealed to the public. The lawyer said that this was an unlawful and unconstitutional location for holding suspects.
According to Abdel-Maqsoud, there are designated places to hold detainees for such periods of time stipulated under the first article of Law 396 of 1956, and state security headquarters is not one of them.
