Interior Ministry announces arrest of Abdel Wanis for implication in Hassm operations

The Interior Ministry on Sunday released a video featuring a recorded interview with Ali Mahmoud Mohamed Abdel Wanis, who described his implication in militant operations for the Hassm movement. The ministry stated in the video that it had arrested Abdel Wanis in recent months after pursuing him in relation to planned activity in Egypt. Hassm is a militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that conducted a series of operations in Egypt and elsewhere from 2016 onward. The group was active in Egypt until 2018, after which its operations became less frequent. The Interior Ministry said in its Sunday statement that it had begun to track Abdel Wanis after a raid its forces conducted last year on a Hassm cell in Giza. The ministry said at the time that it killed two of the group’s members who were planning an operation targeting “security and economic facilities.” Abdel Wanis was previously sentenced to life imprisonment for his implication in several cases, the ministry said Sunday, pointing to an attempted attack on the presidential plane which was prosecuted by the military attorney in Case 120/2022, as well the 2016 assassination of Brigadier General Adel Ragai outside his home in Obour. Abdel Wanis also took part in armed operations including at the Egeizy checkpoint in Monufiya, at the police training center in Tanta where an improvised explosive device was detonated and in the detonation of a car bomb near the Cancer Institute in Cairo in 2019, the ministry said. Hassm denied the movement had conducted the 2019 operation at the time. The Interior Ministry’s video showed Abdel Wanis speaking to an interlocutor offscreen as though in a studio interview, interspersed in documentary-style montage with footage of security incidents like fires, investigation documents, and images and interviews featuring other figures mentioned by Abdel Wanis. He said he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012 and traveled two years later to the Gaza Strip through a border tunnel, where he received military training in anti-aircraft weapons, explosives manufacturing and sniping, under the orders of Muslim Brotherhood leader Yehia Moussa. He added that he later traveled to Somalia on a similar assignment and took part in planning several operations inside Egypt, including attacks on the deputy interior minister for the prisons sector in Tora and on the petroleum minister, which he said “failed and were not carried through.” Abdel Wanis spoke of a joint attempt by the Hassm movement and the Murabitun organization, led by Hisham Ashmawy , to assassinate President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2019 using shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. Ashmawy was later arrested and executed in March 2020. Abdel Wanis also said that he worked with Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including Moussa, Reda Fahmy and Mohamed Manna, to establish media platforms, including Maydan , which he described as the political arm of Hassm, and another called Jewar . The Maydan group presents itself as a national political project born out of the January Revolution, aiming for a peaceful change of the regime. It was co-founded by Moussa, whom the group describes as a prominent figure leading a political struggle to save Egypt from the current regime, while eliding his role in founding Hassm. Abdel Wanis said in the video that Maydan and Jewar’s aims were to promote anti-state narratives about internal conditions and influence public opinion through newspaper sites that outwardly appeared to support the state. The Interior Ministry’s Sunday statement said that Abdel Wanis was “brought in from” an African country, without providing further detail. Al Shehab Center for Human Rights reported in September that Abdel Wanis had travelled from Turkey to Nigeria, where he was arrested. The organization urged authorities not to deport him to Egypt. Abdel Wanis’s wife wrote on Facebook in December that her husband had been forcibly disappeared since August, following his forced deportation from Turkey to Nigeria, where she cited eyewitnesses saying he was in the custody of Egyptian security services and had been interrogated by the National Security Agency. Ahmed Sultan, a researcher on regional security and terrorism, told Mada Masr that he believes the ministry’s decision to release the statement at this time is intended as a message to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly those involved in militant activity abroad. The most important of various messages in the video statement, he noted, is that “no matter how far away they are, they remain under surveillance and can be reached at any time.” Sultan noted the high level of security coordination at present between Egypt and Turkey, where Moussa and several of the group’s leaders are based. The video concluded with a message from Abdel Wanis to his wife and son, urging them not to join any organizations or waste their lives for power. He also called on the leaders of the armed group to stop sacrificing “the lives and youth of young people” and on the organization’s officials to end their war to take over the state. Hassm , a lso known as the Arms of Egypt Movement, is a militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Initially affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood via the “special committees” structure, the group later operated independently, as Egyptian authorities cracked down on the brotherhood and affiliated organizations in the wake of the military ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi in 2013. At a lull in the activity of MB-affiliated militant groups, Hassm first emerged publicly in July 2016 with the killing of Major Mahmoud Abdel Hamid, the head of the investigations unit of the Tamiya district of Fayoum. It also claimed responsibility for the failed assassination attempt of former Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa. Since then, the group has carried out numerous operations, including attacks by armed assailants, improvised explosive devices and car bombs, targeting officials such as the former head of the Alexandria Security Directorate, Mostafa al-Nimr, in 2018. The post Interior Ministry announces arrest of Abdel Wanis for implication in Hassm operations first appeared on Mada Masr .