An interesting eyewitness account by Reuters’ Cynthia Johnston:
The first thing I noticed was the motorcycle.
It was hovering close to the tail of the Reuters Jeep I was riding in to head out of Egypt’s Nile Delta after a surreal day of covering the Muslim Brotherhood’s mostly futile attempts to register for local council elections, due on April 8.
I asked the driver to stop, and the motorcycle stopped as well. When we started moving again, the bike followed. It was the start of a zigzag cat-and-mouse chase along bumpy roads that would last over an hour and involve three pursuing vehicles.
I was in the region to look into complaints by the Brotherhood that the U.S.-backed government was barring its members from submitting nomination papers for the vote, sometimes violently.
The Islamist organization, Egypt’s largest opposition group, is especially strong in parts of the Delta.
In the town of Kafr Saqr, where not a single Brotherhood member had successfully registered before my visit, a handful of candidates told of being obstructed from getting the stamps and paperwork needed to enter the race, and then barred from submitting papers once they were complete.
One potential candidate nursed a black eye. Another, the son of Brotherhood parliamentarian Maher Akl, had a cut lip. Both said they were beaten by police and pro-government thugs when they tried to submit their papers.
Opening up a laptop, the parliamentarian’s son Islam Akl showed pictures of other would-be Brotherhood candidates he said were hurt while trying to submit their papers, including one man with a bloody gash on the back of his head.
“They beat one and it makes everyone afraid. Another one comes, and they won’t let him in, or maybe they will beat him too,” said Hisham al-Ghatwari, a teacher and hopeful Brotherhood candidate who was also acting as my guide in Kafr Saqr.
In other developments, Mubarak’s State Security pigs raided the house of Ikhwan Online editor Abdel Gelil el-Sharnoubi again.
