Former Egyptian vice-president Mohamed ElBaradei has declined to give testimony before a panel created by former interim president Adly Mansour to investigate the bloody violence that followed the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsy in July 2013.
Panel chief Fouad Abdel Moneim Riyad said he had contacted ElBaradei via a mutual friend to ask for his testimony as a witness to the violence between Morsy supporters and opponents backed by police and army forces, whereby ElBaradei told him that the timing was not suitable.
ElBaradei, a former IAEA director and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, had resigned his post as Mansour’s deputy in protest at the violent dispersal of sit-ins by supporters of ousted president Morsy at Rabaa Al-Adaweya and Al-Nahda, where Humans Rights Watch said police and army forces committed crimes against humanity.
According to Riyad, ElBaradei declined to give neither written nor face-to-face testimony, arguing that his account “will not change the current course the country had adopted."
The panel had earlier declared that members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the group to which Morsy belongs to, had also refused to speak to the panel. Riyad ruled out the possibility that panel members would travel abroad to talk with fugitive Brotherhood figures. He said the committee had approached the Foreign Ministry to obtain testimonies from Brotherhood members abroad through its embassies.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
