Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei was chosen Saturday as premier to help lead Egypt out of a deepening crisis, sources said, after bloodshed followed the ouster of the country’s first freely elected president. The Tamarod movement, which engineered mass protests culminating in the overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi on Wednesday, made the announcement after talks with Egypt’s new interim leader.
The news of the appointment, which a military source confirmed to AFP, was greeted with cheers outside Cairo’s Ittihadiya presidential palace, where opponents of Morsi frantically waved Egyptian flags and honked car horns.
It came as the Muslim Brotherhood staged a new show of force to demand that the military restore Morsi, after dozens of people died and hundreds more were injured in 24 hours of violence.
The official MENA news agency said ElBaradei was in talks with caretaker president Adly Mansour.
Tamarod, which has called for demonstrations on Sunday to counter the Islamists, had nominated ElBaradei to represent the grassroots movement in transitional negotiations with the military.
ElBaradei, now 71, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work as the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
He returned to Egypt in 2010 and became a prominent opponent of veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak in the lead-up to the 2011 uprising that overthrew him.
Aya Hosni, a member of Tamarod’s central committee, told AFP that “the interim president and Tamarod had agreed on Mohamed ElBaradei’s nomination as prime minister”.
She said former interior minister Ahmed Gamal El-Din would be in charge of security affairs and economist Ahmed al-Naggar would be the new finance minister.
ElBaradei’s appointment came as an Islamist protest to demand the reinstatement of Morsi petered out at nightfall, following 24 hours of ferocious violence that killed 37 people and injured more than 1,400. AFP
Tears flowed freely as thousands of supporters of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood mourned four members of the movement killed during protests the Islamist movement called to reject the military coup.
The imam told mourners gathered outside Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in the Cairo neighbourhood of Nasr City, where the Islamists have camped for the past 10 days, to pray for the “martyrs of legitimacy”.
-With The Independent input
