Africa

Home page

Africa

Top Egyptian cleric: Mubarak deserves mercy

21 May 2011 21:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A German newspaper reports that Egypt’s top Sunni Muslim cleric says the country’s former president Hosni Mubarak should be granted mercy instead of facing prosecution, APA reports quoting The Associated Press.
German weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung’s Sunday edition quotes Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand sheik of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as saying that "mercy should prevail over justice" given Mubarak’s achievements and his poor health.
Al-Azhar representatives in Cairo could not immediately be reached to confirm the comments.
The weekly says it interviewed the grand sheik of Sunni Islam’s foremost seat of learning in Egypt’s capital.
The cleric was further quoted as saying that toppling Mubarak was an expression of the people’s desire for change "which Al-Azhar supports."