Sadat's killer freed
2003-09-29 16:33
Cairo - Egyptian authorities have freed a repentant leader of the Islamic militants who murdered president Anwar Sadat 22 years ago, in a move aimed at showing their grip on security, analysts said on Monday.
Karam Zohdi, 51, a leader of the Jamaa Islamiya group, was freed at the weekend because, law enforcement sources said, he had not only served his sentence, but was also suffering from heart problems and had repented.
He was one of about 1 000 members of the radical Jamaa Islamiya group who promised to give up their militant activities released by Egyptian authorities over the weekend, police said on Monday.
"Almost 1 000 Jamaa Islamiya members who have made a commitment to renounce violence and extremist ideas have been freed," they said.
The Jamaa members were released over the weekend with the approach of the Egyptian national holiday on October 6 marking the anniversary of the 1973 war against Israel.
The authorities said Zohdi, the highest Jamaa member to be freed from prison, has since returned to his family in the southern city of Minya along the Nile.
In a July prison interview with Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Zohdi voiced "deep sorrow" for Sadat's murder and called him a "martyr," adding that "if time could be turned back" he would not have approved the attack.
Climate of calm
Sadat was shot and killed by Khaled al-Islambuli, who was one of several Jamaa members who surged from the ranks of a military parade on October 6, 1981 and attacked the official reviewing stand in northern Cairo.
Jamaa and Islamic Jihad, Egypt's other main armed militant group, had struck an alliance to overthrow Sadat, who had courted them when he came to power in 1970 in order to counter the leftist opposition.
Zohdi, head of the Jamaa's ruling consultative council, was sentenced in 1981 to life in prison for approving and helping to plot the assassination.
In Egypt, life amounts to 25 years in prison, but with a year considered nine months rather than 12 months. The authorities never explained why he had not been released more than three years ago.
Montasser al-Zayyat, an Islamist lawyer who has represented militants, said that "in releasing the Jamaa leader, the government want to prove it is confident in itself and in the climate of calm reigning in the country" since a wave of militant violence stopped in the late 1990s.
Pacifist ideas
"The authorities also want to show the confidence between them and the Jamaa, whose leaders inside the country renounced violence" in 1997, Zayyat told AFP.
A police source, asking not to be named, said "the authorities would have derived great benefit from the pacifist ideas he was supporting in prison."
"Zohdi played a major role in the renouncing of violence that was announced by Jamaa leaders from prison in 1997, in abandoning the armed struggle and in dissolving the armed branch of the organisation," the police source said.
Zayyat said that Zohdi "held several meetings with Islamists imprisoned with him and in other detention places. I felt he was not so concerned to leave as to have his (pacifist) ideas spread."
The police source said his release is also beneficial because "someone like Zohdi, a reference for Islamists, is a considerable asset when preaching tolerance and dialogue among the young."
Jamaa's bloody campaign of violence claimed about 1,300 lives in Egypt.