Egyptian police arrest ex-PM attempting to escape to Sudan

PanARMENIAN.Net - Egyptian police arrested ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi's former prime minister as tensions rose after a major car-bomb attack on a police building killed 15 people, AFP reports.

The interior ministry said ex-premier Hisham Qandil, who is facing jail after being convicted of failing to respect a court ruling while in office, was arrested in the desert outside Cairo with a "smuggler attempting to escape to Sudan".

An unpopular prime minister who struggled to right a dire economy, Qandil has kept a relatively low profile since the military overthrew Morsi in July.

He represented an alliance of pro-Morsi Islamist groups in meetings with European mediators who tried to defuse tensions with the military-installed government. The efforts failed in August, with the police launching a massive crackdown that killed more than 1,000 people in street clashes.

In April, while still in office, Qandil was sentenced to a year in prison for not carrying out a ruling to re-nationalize a company that had been privatized in 1996. An appeals court upheld the sentence in September.

Qandil's arrest followed an early-morning car bombing outside the police headquarters in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura that killed at least 15 people, including at least 12 policemen.

The explosion, which the country's military-installed authorities suggested was carried out by Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, was one of the deadliest since the Islamist leader's ouster, which has bitterly polarized the country.

The Muslim Brotherhood condemned the bombing "in the strongest possible terms".