The Cairo Court for Urgent Matters presided over by Judge Mohamed al-Sayyed Sunday designated the Islamic State (IS) group a “terrorist group,” and officially banned its activities in Egypt, Youm7 reported.
“This group claimed that it is an organization that represents an Islamic state, which is not Islam at all; it is a rogue group that takes habitual murder as the law, and violence as an approach to be covered behind the Islamic religion,” the court verdict read.
Lawyer Ahmed Ibrahim, the director of the Struggle Center for Rights and Freedoms, filed a September lawsuit to label IS a terrorist group, and the first hearing in the trial was held on Oct. 1.
In June, an alleged member of IS was arrested by security forces in the city of Minya Al-Qamh in Sharqia governorate in the Nile Delta on charges of forming a cell in Egypt aimed at spreading chaos and destruction, Youm7 reported.
IS—at the time called the Islamic State of Iraq—was designated a “terrorist group” in 2004 by the United Nations and European Union. The U.K., U.S., Australia, Indonesia, Canada, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are among other countries that have given it a similar designation.
The Sinai-based and Al-Qaeda-inspired Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM) group on Nov. 11 announced “its homage” to IS, Reuters reported. ABM has intensified a jihadi militant campaign against mostly Egyptian security targets since the ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
