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Egypt police detain 245 members of revived group

CAIRO: Egyptian police have detained 245 members of an extreme Islamist group in raids in 17 of Egypt's 26 provinces, the Interior Ministry said on Wednesday.

The detainees are from the Takfir and Higra Group, which believes that its members are the only true believers, and they were planning acts of violence, it said.

The group sprang to prominence under Shukri Mustafa in 1977, when members kidnapped and killed the Minister of Religious Endowments, Sheikh Mohamed Hussein al-Dahabi.

An Interior Ministry statement named six Egyptian-based leaders among the 245 detainees and said the head of a 57-strong leadership abroad was Mohamed al-Amin Abdelfattah, who it said was on the run in Jordan.

The group has been raising money through exchange houses, including an unnamed one in Jordan, and through a tourism company based in The Hague, it added. It had plans to open a currency exchange company in the Nile Delta town of Zagazig.

In the raids the police found three firearms, ammunition, 13,000 pounds ($3,800) in cash and large quantities of printed and handwritten material on the group's ideology, it said.

The Takfir and Higra group, named after its belief in denouncing others as infidels (kafirs) and in following the example of the Prophet Mohammad by migrating (higra) to other areas, has made little impact in Egypt since the 1970s.

The main Muslim organisations fighting the government have been the Gama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) and Jihad. More than 920 people have been killed in political violence in Egypt since the Gama'a took up arms in 1992.

But the Interior Ministry statement showed that three of the sixed named leaders of Takfir and Higra were arrested in connection with the group's activities as late as 1989.

"The organisation was trying to reorganise its ranks and its cells at home and abroad and preparing to start carrying out criminal acts of violence," it added.

"It held meetings to plan operations, share out tasks....and to teach the organisation's erroneous ideas -- that society is infidel, that education at school and university is sinful, that some of the duties of a Muslim such as going on pilgrimage or praying in mosques are not obligatory," it said.-Reuter