The Interior Ministry announced this week the arrest of Ali Mahmoud Abdel-Wanis, a leading member of the terrorist movement Hasm, the armed wing of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group, on charges of attempting to assassinate President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and planning to carry out terrorist operations aimed at destabilising the country.
In a press statement on Sunday, the ministry said the arrest was part of its ongoing operations against leading members of the Hasm movement.
“The arrest was part of efforts to apprehend Hasm members involved in terrorist activities aimed at harming the state, including directing two of its operatives — Ahmed Mohamed Abdel-Razek and Ihab Abdel-Latif Mohamed — to target a number of security and economic installations and attack President Al-Sisi’s plane using SAM-7 shoulder-fired missiles,” the statement said.
The attacks preceded raids by the security forces on 7 July 2025 on a Hasm hideout, which resulted in the deaths of the two Hasm operatives.
The official statement indicated that the terrorist Abdel-Wanis from the Nile Delta governorate of Menoufiya was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of involvement in several terrorism cases, most notably case 120/2022 related to an attempt to target the presidential plane and the assassination of police colonel Maged Abdel-Razek.
The ministry’s statement was accompanied by confessions from Abdel-Wanis about the terrorist operations he and other members of the Hasm movement had planned. The confessions were broadcast on Egyptian television channels on Sunday evening.
Abdel-Wanis confessed that fugitive Muslim Brotherhood official and founder of Hasm Yehia Moussa had contacted him in 2019 and asked if he had received training on shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles in preparation for an operation targeting President Al-Sisi’s plane.
Abdel-Wanis’ confessions also revealed that fugitive Muslim Brotherhood leaders, particularly Yehia Moussa, had overseen the plot against President Al-Sisi’s life, with some members receiving advanced training in the use of anti-aircraft missiles while in camps in abroad, including in the Gaza Strip.
“I and others went to Gaza, and there we received training on the use of the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles SAM 7 and SAM 17,” Abdel-Wanis said.
The attempt to target President Al-Sisi’s plane dates back to 2019, when Hasm members plotted to shoot it down using shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. The attempt was thwarted thanks to stringent security measures.
Abdel-Wanis also confessed to participating in several other terrorist operations, including “targeting the Al-Agizi checkpoint in Menoufiya governorate, detonating an explosive device in front of the police training centre in Tanta, which resulted in the death and injury of a number of police officers, and the assassination of police Brigadier-General Adel Ragaai in front of his home in Obour City east of Cairo.”
Abdel-Wanis spoke about his infiltration into a neighbouring country in 2016 based on an assignment from Yehia Moussa, his communication with the leaders of the Al-Morabitoun organisation founded by terrorist Hisham Ashawi, who was arrested in Libya and later executed in Egypt, and the establishment of a camp in one of the neighbouring countries (Libya) to train Hasm elements in the use of anti-aircraft missiles, heavy weapons, and explosives.
Abdel-Wanis also revealed that he and the fugitive leaders of the Hasm movement abroad, namely Yehia Moussa, Mohamed Rafiq Ibrahim Manaa, Alaa Ali Al-Samahi, Mohamed Abdel-Hafiz, and Abdallah Abdel-Hafiz, had planned in 2019 to carry out a number of terrorist operations in the country and caused members of Hasm to prepare car bombs, one of which exploded in front of the National Cancer Institute in downtown Cairo.
In 2025, they pushed fugitive Hasm terrorist elements Mahmoud Shehata Ali Gad and Mustafa Ahmed Mohamed Abdel-Wahab to return to the country to carry out terrorist operations, but they were unable to do so as a result of their surveillance and eventual arrest by the security forces.
Abdel-Wanis said that with the help of Muslim Brotherhood leader Helmi Al-Gazzar and using $10,000 as payment, he had been able to get a passport and travel to a third country, believed to be Turkey.
Abdel-Wanis, 34, said he joined the Muslim Brotherhood organisation in 2012 when he was a student at the Faculty of Agriculture at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
“In 2014, after the removal of the one-year regime of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yehia Moussa, the founder and leader of Hasm, contacted me and asked me to travel and receive training in Gaza,” Abdel-Wanis said, adding that he had travelled to Gaza through a tunnel from Egypt, where he received training through courses in field skills, anti-tank warfare, anti-aircraft warfare, explosives engineering, and sniping.
“I stayed in the Gaza Strip for four months, after which I returned to Egypt on assignment from Yehia Moussa to carry out a number of sabotage operations inside Egypt. After that I was assigned to travel to Somalia, and from there we planned to mastermind terrorist operations inside Egypt,” Abdel-Wanis said.
In parallel to the terrorist plots, Abdel-Wanis said that Hasm leaders Yehia Moussa, Sayed Ibrahim Moussa, and Reda Fahmi Mohamed Khalil had focused on expanding the impact of their terrorist operations by managing a media platform called the Midan Foundation, which aimed to promote rumours and false news about Egypt’s internal situation and to encourage people, especially young people, to revolt against the authorities.
Their aim was to spread chaos that they believed would pave the way for the Muslim Brotherhood to regain power.
Abdel-Wanis said that the Muslim Brotherhood and its armed wing Hasm portray their war against the Egyptian state as a religious war. “But it is a war for power in fact, and I say to the leaders of these two groups enough bloodshed, enough wasted young lives, and enough of lives being wasted in prison for no reason.”
The last operations attributed to the Hasm movement in Egypt date back to 2019, when the authorities accused it of involvement in a car bombing near the National Cancer Institute in Cairo, which killed 22 people and injured dozens of others.
The group was also accused of attempting to assassinate former grand mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa in August 2016 as well as assassinating Mahmoud Abdel-Hamid, the head of the Tamiya police station in Fayoum governorate, in July 2016, the year the movement officially announced its existence.
Security expert and former deputy head of the State Security Service Fouad Allam said in a TV interview that Abdel-Wanis had escaped from Egypt and fled to Turkey in 2019.
Abdel-Wanis was apprehended after leaving Turkish territory for Nigeria, where he was arrested upon his arrival in coordination with the relevant authorities, Allam said, indicating that the “growing Egyptian-Turkish security coordination in recent months may have contributed to tightening the noose on the terrorist groups and elements that left Egypt after the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in July 2013.”
Allam said the decision by the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a terrorist organisation would greatly help tighten the noose on the group’s movements, dry up its financial resources, and thwart terrorist plots.
Maher Farghali, an expert on the terrorist groups, said the arrest of Abdel-Wanis was a blow to the Muslim Brotherhood organisation and reflected the success of the Egyptian security services in penetrating the structure of this group and its armed wing Hasm.
Farghali said that Abdel-Wanis was not an ordinary member of Hasm, but rather one of five key leaders who were running the terrorist movement’s activities, along with Yehia Moussa, Mohamed Abdel-Hafez, Mohamed Rafik Mohamed Montasser, and Alaa Al-Samahi.
Farghali said that Hasm’s founder Yehia Moussa took over the leadership of the group in 2014 and merged it with the Liwaa Al-Thawra organisation in cooperation with fugitive terrorist Alaa Al-Samahi as part of a plan they called “the armed movement of Egypt”.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 2 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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