Hossam Menoufy: Emergency landing drops Hasm founder in grip of Egyptian security
On the morning of Wednesday, January
12, Hossam Mahmoud Salam, nicknamed Menoufy, packed his bags and collected his
papers and clothes in preparation for leaving Sudan and traveling to Turkey to
start a new phase in a spot witnessing a heavy presence of Brotherhood leaders,
as he is helped found Harakat Sawa'd Misr (Arms of Egypt Movement), known as
Hasm, which is classified as a terrorist group affiliated with the Brotherhood.
Things were going as Menoufy
planned, until the Egyptian authorities allowed a plane coming from Sudan to
make an emergency landing at Luxor International Airport in the south of the
country during its flight from Khartoum to Istanbul, with 138 passengers on
board. After the pilot of the plane informed the control tower as soon as he
entered Egyptian airspace, a fire alarm had been issued in his plane.
As the passengers disembarked and
their documents were seen, Menoufy was taken to the security authority
entrusted with interrogation, nine years after he fled to Sudan in 2013.
Armed
engagement
Menoufy studied at the Faculty of
Engineering at Menoufia University in Egypt’s Delta region and was expelled
from the college in 2014 along with nine others belonging to the terrorist
group for a month for assaulting the administrative staff, storming the college
dean's office, and smashing the latter’s car. He was convicted and sentenced to
three years in prison.
He also participated in the
establishment of the Hasm movement and was involved in the implementation of
several terrorist operations on behalf of the Brotherhood, including the
attempt to assassinate former Grand Mufti Dr. Ali Gomaa and Assistant Public
Prosecutor Counsellor Zakaria Abdel Aziz Othman, as well as the targeting of a
number of army and police officers in the period following the fall of the
Brotherhood's rule in the June 30, 2013 revolution.
The founding of Hasm came in
response to the desire of the Brotherhood leaders who fled to Turkey to revive
armed action inside Egypt through the formation of a new armed organization,
which has several names such as Sawa’d Misr and Liwa al-Thawra, and selecting elements
that meet the physical and psychological requirements, their inclusion in armed
fighting groups, training them inside and outside Egypt, and then assigning
them to target state institutions and symbols and cause security chaos.
In January 2021, the US State
Department included Hasm on the global terrorism list, along with Ansar Beit
al-Maqdis, the ISIS branch in Sinai.
