Antananarivo | Sunday
AN Egyptian, whom police linked to the lieutenant of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, was sentenced on Sunday to 10 years in jail with hard labor for membership in an anti-government group, court sources said.
The High State Security Court here handed down the sentence to Mohamed al-Sayyed Soleiman Hassan Yussef (30) who was extradited to Egypt two years ago from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the sources said.
He was convicted of charges of belonging to an illegal underground group whose goal was to ”suspend the constitution” as well as of having falsified passports as well as immigration department stamps with the goal of using them to ”commit terrorist acts,” according to court sources.
The group’s name was not specified in the charge sheet, but police suspected Yussef was a member of the armed Egyptian Islamist group Al-Jihad and a colleague of Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of Al-Jihad and bin Laden’s lieutenant.
He admitted to the Egyptian security services following his extradition here that he had travelled to Afghanistan in 1991 through Turkey and Pakistan, police sources said.
Following military training in Afghanistan, he returned in 1993 to Pakistan, where he met several times with Zawahri, the sources said.
In 1994, he travelled to the United Arab Emirates following a stopover in Yemen where leaders of the Al-Jihad organisation gave him a false passport and the name Ahmed Abdullah al-Tirkawi, they added.
In the Emirates, he worked for the Al-Sewidi air conditioning company whose owner Ibrahim Taha was close to Zawahri’s brother Mohamed and also a leader of Jihad, the sources said.
Mohammed al-Zawahri was extradited from the UAE to Egypt in 2001, according to the London-based Islamic Observation Center, which promoted itself as orgnanization that defended the rights of Islamists worldwide.
Its director Yasser al-Siri, who was arrested in London on charges of conspiracy to murder Afghan opposition commander Ahmad Shah Masood, said the group had good contacts in Afghanistan. – Sapa-AFP