How Hamas helped Morsi escape.

How Hamas helped Morsi escape.Thenational. By Bradley Hope.

In January 2011, as the anti-Mubarak uprising gathered pace, many Muslim Brotherhood figures broke out of prisons in Egypt. The key role Hamas and Hizbollah members seemed to have played in organising the escapes is now being revealed, Bradley Hope, Foreign Correspondent, reports.

CAIRO // It was an event easily overlooked during the pandemonium that engulfed Egypt in the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak and his regime.

Shortly after 2am on January 30, 2011, Mohammed Morsi and 31 other members of the Muslim Brotherhood escaped from a maximum-security prison complex 120 kilometres north of the capital, Cairo.

Mr Morsi, who was elected president in June 2012 and then forced from office last month, was among the more than 20,000 inmates who broke out of Wadi Natroun and 10 other jails around the country following a series of orchestrated attacks that began two days earlier.

Besides senior Brotherhood officials, some 40 members of two other prominent regional Islamist groups – Hamas and Lebanon's Hizbollah – also escaped.

Last month, the judge overseeing the prison break case announced that Mr Morsi would be detained pending investigations into charges that he committed espionage and conspired to kill Egyptian police.

He has not yet been transferred to a prison for the case. The military has held him and several of his aides at an undisclosed location since he was removed from power last month.

Hisham Barakat, the public prosecutor in the case, alleged that Mr Morsi secretly colluded with Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip, in planning an assault on the prison in 2011.

The validity of the charges against Mr Morsi is hotly disputed in Egypt.

For those Egyptians who view the military’s intervention on July 3 as a necessary step to save the Egyptian state, the prosecution is a sign that justice finally is being delivered to men who conspired with foreign militants to destabilise the country in preparation for imposing Islamic rule over the country.

For those who view the removal and detention of Mr Morsi as an illegal and unjust military coup, the charges against him are baseless.

Yet it is not only Mr Morsi who is on trial in the case of the Wadi Natroun jailbreak. In a sense, regional experts say, the origins of the 2011 uprising also are being judged, as Egypt veers back towards the security climate that marked much of nearly three decades of Mubarak’s rule.

Testifying on September 14, 2011, in the trial of Mubarak on charges of complicity in the deaths of protesters during the 2011 uprising, Suleiman said Egypt's spy agencies started monitoring communications between members of Hamas and Bedouins in Sinai on January 26, 2011 - one day after mass protests broke out.

"Hamas communicated with the Bedouins and agreed that they would provide them with ordnance in exchange for assistance in freeing their comrades from Egyptian prisons," said Suleiman, according to a transcript of his court testimony.

The Al Qassam Brigades, the militant wing of Hamas, "created a diversion so that the border guards would not pursue the smuggled ordnance. Thus the weapons, ammunition and explosives were successfully smuggled and given to the Bedouins," he said.

With up to 90 Gaza-based members of Hizbollah, Hamas militants then entered Egypt illegally and led the assaults on prisons across the country, said Suleiman, who died in July last year.Read the full story here.