Buried deep down in this mainstream media treatment are some interesting if not troubling revelations regarding a jihadist in Cairo named Aboud Al-Zomor, who was recently released from prison by the post Mubarak regime. Any emphasis added below is my own. Excerpts from “Sadat’s assassination plotter remains unrepentant”, MSNBC, 5 July 2011:
Egyptian authorities…believed Zomor was one of the plot’s top masterminds. He was sentenced to life in prison. But Zomor was released as part of an ongoing amnesty program after the revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square earlier this year overthrew President Mubarak.
I spoke with Zomor for an hour in a humble fifth-floor walkup apartment a few miles from the Great Pyramids on the edge of Cairo. Zomor, now 64 years old, remains an Islamic hardliner. His beard, now grey, falls to his chest. He is unrepentant about killing Sadat. His only regret, he says, is that assassinating Sadat brought Mubarak to power.
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Our conversation then returned to Sadat. I wanted to know what motivated him and the other plotters to kill the Egyptian president. Was it the peace deal with Israel, or something else?
“Was Sadat killed because he wanted a deal with Israel, was that the only reason?” I asked.
“This was not the only point, this point [the peace deal], preceded [the assassination] by two years. He made that deal and no one killed
him or planned to,” Zomor said.“The decision [to kill Sadat] was based on a number of factors together. The first issue was the issue of sharia [Islamic law], that he was standing against sharia, against its implementation and application. This was the primary reason that this regime must be removed.
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After the interview, Zomor left the apartment. I watched him walk down the street. He was stopped repeatedly. People came up to shake his hand. They wanted to meet him. A poor man pushing a cart bought him a glass of sugarcane juice. Zomor was treated more like a celebrity — more like a fellow revolutionary — than an organizer of Egypt’s most notorious assassination in modern history.