WASHINGTON, Cairo (AFP)-Ten people, including four women, suspected of belonging to a banned Islamic group, have been brought before Egypt's supreme state security court, a senior court official announced.
They are all accused of having belonged from 1990-1999 to the banned fundamentalist Al-Takfir wal-Higra (Atonement and Self-Denial), said chief prosecutor, Maher Abdel Wahed to reporters.
The suspects face charges of belonging to "an illegal group aimed at preventing the application of the constitution and violating the liberties of citizens."
They were arrested last year in the Giza province south of Cairo. While the men have been held in custody since their arrest, the four women have been released on bail.
Takfir wal-Higra detests Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and calls on its followers to avoid all contact with state institutions, said Abdel Wahed.
They believe it is justifiable to take citizens' possessions and to take women by force and have been involved in thefts from both private homes and mosques, he added.
"The accused have used religion to propagate fundamentalist ideas, calling for sedition and giving the Islamic religion a bad name," he said.
The group forbade members from praying in mosques and called on them to cut themselves off from Egyptian society, the prosecutor added.
The accused wanted to reactivate the group, founded in 1971 by Chukri Ahmed Mustapha, a farming engineer and a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood who became disillusioned by their reformist attitude.
The group was behind the July 1977 abduction and murder of religious affairs minister Mohammed Hussein Dahabi, the first such political abduction since the 1952 revolution that abolished the monarchy.
The killing sparked a police campaign against the group, which ended on November 30, 1977, when the movement's founder and four of his lieutenants were condemned to death. They were hung several months later.
The Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate Islamic fundamentalist group, is also banned in Egypt.
