Egypt’s Salafi Al-Nour party has dismissed the latest Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on the Rabaa Al Adawiya massacre, describing it as “foreign meddling”.
Responding to the HRW report, which says the mass killings that took place in Rabaa on 14 August, 2013 may amount to crimes against humanity, the secretary general of Al-Nour Party, Galal Al-Morra, issued a statement on the party’s Facebook page saying that his party “rejects any direct or indirect, justified or unjustified foreign meddling in Egyptian affairs”.
Al-Morra pointed out that his party has repeatedly requested for the authorities to form a fact-finding committee to prosecute the Rabaa culprits, adding that the delay in addressing this issue “opens the door to everything that would jeopardise the interests of the nation”.
On Tuesday 12 August, HRW published a 188-page report based on a yearlong investigation into the Rabaa massacre. The report, titled “All According to Plan: The Rabaa Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt”, concluded that the mass killings in Rabaa likely amounted to crimes against humanity.
HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth said Rabaa was “a violent crackdown planned at the highest levels of the Egyptian government”.
According to HRW, in the August 14 dispersal of the Rab’a al-Adawiya sit-in alone, security forces, following a plan that envisioned several thousand deaths, killed a minimum of 817 people and more likely at least 1,000.
The rights group accuses the Egyptian authorities of failing to investigate the incident, and has called upon the UN Human Rights Council to form a committee to identify those responsible for the massacre.
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Al-Nour’s leadership supported the military coup which overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
Saudi Arabia who also backed the coup led by former field marshal turned president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, provided financial aid to the Egyptian regime and supported its brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
