Egypt Islamists call "Friday of rejection" against coup

An Islamist coalition led by the Muslim Brotherhood appealed to Egyptians on Thursday to demonstrate across the nation in a "Friday of Rejection" against a military coup that ousted elected President Mohamed Morsi.

The National Coalition in Support of Legitimacy "calls on the Egyptian people to take to the streets and mobilize peacefully" after Friday prayers "to say 'No' to military detentions, 'No' to the military coup".
   
The call was issued at a news conference at a mosque in suburban Cairo where Morsi supporters have staged a sit-in since last week. Troops with armored vehicles have surrounded the area since Wednesday, when Morsi was toppled, but have not intervened to clear the protesters.

Earlier, Egyptian judge Adli Mansour was sworn in as Egypt’s interim head of state minutes after taking his oath of office as head of the constitutional court.

Mansour replaced Mohamed Morsi as president, becoming head of state under an army transition plan.

Speaking at the Constitutional Court in Cairo, Mansour said he planned to hold parliamentary and Presidential elections "by respecting the people's will."

He saluted the Egyptian people who "stood unbowed" as well as the judicial system and the policemen who "stood by the people."

This as the Egyptian prosecutor's office ordered the arrest of the Muslim Brotherhood's top leader, Mohamed Badie, and his deputy, Khairat el-Shater, judicial and army sources said.

Later in the day, the Associated Press quoted Egyptian officials as saying that Muslim Brotherhood Supreme leader Mohammad Badie has been arrested in the northern city of Marsa Matrouh.

Millions celebrated all night while Mohammed Morsi ousted after only a year in office by the same kind of Arab Spring uprising that brought the Islamist leader to power and his Muslim Brotherhood blasted the action as a "full coup" by the generals.

Fearing a violent reaction by Morsi's Islamist supporters, troops and armored vehicles deployed in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, surrounding Islamist rallies. Clashes erupted in several provincial cities when Islamists opened fire on police, with at least nine people killed, security officials said.

Gehad el-Haddad, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood party, said Morsi was under house arrest at a Presidential Guard facility where he had been residing, and 12 presidential aides also were under house arrest.

Meanwhile, influential Egyptian Salafist cleric Dawa Salafiya called on Islamists to leave the streets and go home, the state news agency reported on Thursday.

“All sons of the Islamist movement do not put yourselves in fatal danger,” he urged all followers.

Similarly, Mohamed El-Beltagy, a senior Muslim Brotherhood said that the Islamist group will not take up arms in the wake of the military overthrow, adding however that it will not accept the military coup.

    

"This is a military coup. We will remain and deprive it of legitimacy until it is corrected," El-Beltagy told reporters at a pro-Morsi sit-in outside a mosque in Cairo.

    

Asked if the Brotherhood might take up arms, he said: "No. That is unlikely." The 85-year-old movement, long suppressed during years of military-backed rule, renounced violence decades ago.

He added that the military overthrow of elected Islamist President Mohamed Morsi will push other groups, though not his own, to violent resistance.    

"The issue is not with Brothers being in or out of prison. The Brothers have lived in prisons for ages," Mohamed El-Beltagy, a leading member of the Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, told reporters.    

"The issue now is the position of the free world that is pushing the country to a state of chaos and pushing groups other than the Brotherhood to return to the idea of change by force," he said.

In turn, a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood executive board said on Thursday that the party will not work with "the usurper authorities", rejecting feelers from the newly sworn-in head of state after the military removed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi from power.    

"We reject participation in any work with the usurper authorities," Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Barr said in a statement published on the group's website.    

"We call on protesters to show self-restraint and stay peaceful. We reject the oppressive, police state practices: killing, arrests, curbing media freedom and closing TV channels."

The army took control of state media and blacked out TV stations operated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The head of the Brotherhood's political wing was arrested.

Egypt's main alliance of liberal and leftist parties said it opposed excluding any Islamist parties from political life after the military-backed authorities arrested Muslim Brotherhood leaders and shut down Islamist-run media.

Protests sparked throughout Egypt during the spring of 2013.

The latest wave of protests started on June 30 - the anniversary of Morsi's first year in power.

More than 22 million signed a petition calling for the country's Islamist president to step down, according to Tamarod, which means "rebel" in Arabic, the group that organized the petition campaign.

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki said that the army's removal of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi was unacceptable and urged Egypt to guarantee Mursi's safety.
   
But French President Francois Hollande declined at a joint news conference with Marzouki in Tunis to speak of a coup, saying merely that "the democratic process has stopped and must return".
   
Marzouki said: "Military intervention is totally unacceptable and we call on Egypt to ensure that Mursi is physically protected."
   
He added: "We view what is happening in Egypt with concern - the arrests of journalists and politicians."

Earlier, Tunisia's ruling Islamist party, Ennahda, condemned what it called a "coup against legitimacy" after the army ousted Islamist Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president.
   
"Ennahda rejects what happened and believes legitimacy is represented by President Mohamed Morsi, and no one else," said a statement from the party, which has headed the Tunisian government since 2011.

Meanwhile, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon expressed hope for a speedy transition to civilian rule in Egypt. 

This as a European Union official said he did not know of any plans for the bloc to change its aid programs for Egypt after the army ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

"I am not aware of any urgent plans to rethink our aid programs at the moment but ... the dust is still settling on what happened last night," Michael Mann, a spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, told reporters.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said that a "genuine democratic transition" needs to take place in Egypt now that the military has ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

"We never support in countries, the intervention by the military, but what what now needs to happen, what we need to happen now in Egypt is for democracy to flourish and for a genuine democratic transition to take place, and all parties need to be involved in that and that's what Britain and our allies will be saying very clearly to the Egyptians," Cameron said.

Meanwhile, Qatar said it supports the will of the Egyptian people and views Egypt as a leader in the Arab and Islamic world, al Jazeera television reported, quoting a foreign ministry source in the first Qatari reaction to the ousting of President Mohamed Mursi, an ally of the Gulf state

In contrast, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu described as "unacceptable" the army's ousting of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, an intervention he labeled a "military coup".

"Only can you be removed from duty through elections, that is, the will of the people. It is unacceptable for a government, which has come to power through democratic elections, to be toppled through illicit means and even more, a military coup," Davutoglu told reporters.

For its part, the Syrian government hailed Morsi's ouster, calling the revolution a "great achievement".

As for the African Union, it said it was likely to suspend Egypt from all activities after "unconstitutional power change," a senior AU source said.

Egypt's pound strengthened suddenly on the black market on Thursday to 7.30/35 to the U.S. dollar from 7.60/65 earlier in the day, a trader said.

    

Other markets have improved a day after the military pushed the country's Muslim Brotherhood president out of power, including the stock market, whose main index shot up by 7.3 percent.

    

The pound had earlier strengthened marginally on the official market after a central bank auction, its first such increase since a currency crisis in December.

    

Traders said prices of Egypt's international bonds were quoted sharply higher, by several cents on the dollar.