A leader of Jama’a al-Islamiya refuted former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly’s testimony during his own trial that his anti-terrorism efforts encouraged the Islamist group to renounce violence.
Adly is awaiting a verdict alongside former President Hosni Mubarak and six former senior security officials being tried for involvement in killing protesters during the 25 January uprising against Mubarak’s rule.
Asem Abdel Maged, a member of Jama’a al-Islamiya’s leadership council said Wednesday on Al-Tahrir satellite channel that internal group decisions, not Adly, led it to renounce violence.
"We made jurisprudential revisions, and some were agreed upon by the Shura Council [the group’s governing body] and published in four well-known books,” he said on the “In the Square” program.
"The revisions are our own work, and Adly did not write them,” Abdel Maged stressed. “Not even once did the group coordinate with the Interior Ministry or security services.”
Jama’a al-Islamiya engaged in armed confrontations with government security forces in the 1990s, aiming to depose the Mubarak regime and establish an Islamic state. However, in the late 1990s, the group announced it would abandon its violent, jihadist ideology, and apologized for previous attacks that had killed hundreds.
Abdel Maged said the relationship between his group and the Interior Ministry had always been “strained” because “the group was always keen to say the truth, and used to tell Mubarak, ‘You are unjust and you have to leave power.’”
He pointed out that the group’s leaders had warned political forces, the president, and the Interior Ministry more than once when they were in custody that the situation would explode. Soon thereafter, Abdel Maged said, many clashes took place between the group’s young members and the police.
“We only fought the police who fought us, and we did not kill innocent people,” he said.
Adly told the Cairo Criminal Court during his last trial session Wednesday that he had contributed to eradicating terrorism in Egypt by calling on terrorists to renounce violence. While in office, Adly was responsible for orchestrating security crackdowns on militant groups, including arrests of Jama'a al-Islamiya members.
Adly said that his anti-terrorism policy urged terrorists and those who embraced violence to revise their ideologies. The former interior minister claimed that his policy prompted many Jama'a al-Islamiya leaders to correct their ideas and carry out intellectual revisions, and that approximately 90 percent of Egyptian terrorist groups, including Jama’a al-Islamiya, rejected violence.
