The head of Egypt’s armed forces issued a declaration yesterday suspending the constitution and appointing the constitutional court President Adly Mansour as interim head of state. He will be sworn in today.
In a televised broadcast, flanked by military leaders, religious authorities and political figures, General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi effectively declared the removal of elected Islamist President Mohammed Mursi.
The president of the supreme constitutional court will act as interim head of state, assisted by an interim council and a technocratic government until new presidential and parliamentary elections are held.
“Those in the meeting have agreed on a roadmap for the future that includes initial steps to achieve the building of a strong Egyptian society that is cohesive and does not exclude anyone and ends the state of tension and division,” Sisi said in a solemn address broadcast live on state television.
Meanwhile, security forces raided the Cairo offices of Al Jazeera’s Egyptian television channel on Wednesday and detailed at least five staff, hours after the army toppled Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, a journalist at the station said.
Karim El Assiuti said his colleagues at Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr channel were arrested while working in the studio. The station was prevented from broadcasting from a pro-Mursi rally and its crew there was also detained.
After Sisi spoke, hundreds of thousands of anti-Mursi protesters in central Cairo’s Tahrir Square erupted into wild cheering, setting off fireworks and waving flags.
But a statement published in Mursi’s name on his official Facebook page after Sisi’s speech said the measures announced amounted to “a full military coup” and were “totally rejected”.
The Arab world’s most populous nation has been in turmoil since the fall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak as Arab Spring uprisings took hold in early 2011, arousing concern among allies in the West and in Israel, with which Egypt has a 1979 peace treaty.
