CAIRO-An Egyptian court started on Tuesday to look into a plea by a lawyer for Mohamed el-Zawahri, the younger brother of al-Qaeda's second-in-command and potential successor to Osama bin Laden, Ayman el-Zawahri, to refer him to an ordinary court instead of the military court where he is currently being tried. The lawyer, Nizar Ghurab, said to the judges of the Higher Administrative Court that Mohamed el-Zawahri was not in jail for any logical criminal reasons. “He was rather there for reasons that did with the brutality of the former regime and its ability to put people who did nothing wrong in jail,” he told the court on Tuesday. Mohamed el-Zawahri, an engineer by profession, was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in 1999, handed to Egyptian authorities, and remained in state security jails since then. He was released briefly (for two days) after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, but was later arrested and put in the Torah Prison, which now owes its fame to the presence of a large number of former government officials in it on corruption charges. His relatives say he was severely tortured when he was in State security jails in ways that had a bad effect on his health. “He almost lost his eyesight after spending a long time in underground cells,” Mahfouz Azam, el-Zawahri's uncle, said. “He shudders in fear whenever anybody comes close to him, thinking that he will be beaten yet again,” he added. At the court yesterday, Ghurab told the story of exchanges between the CIA and Egyptian intelligence officers a few years ago when the Americans mistook a man they killed in Afghanistan for Ayman el-Zawahri. The Americans wanted a sample of Mohamed el-Zawahri's blood to see whether it matched the killed man's blood. The Egyptians, however, offered to give the Americans Mohamed el-Zawahri's whole arm. Details of these exchanges are also mentioned in a book written by the US author Ron Suskind. The book is called “The One Percent Doctrine”. “This is just a story that proves that the former regime's brutality,” he said. “Mohamed el-Zawahri had done nothing at all to be in jail,” he added. He said his client was sentenced to death in 2001 for no reason as well, but was notified about the sentence only recently when the authorities wanted to use it as a pressure card to get information about Ayman el-Zawahri.
