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Egyptian authorities said on Friday they had arrested the acting leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mahmoud Ezzat, during a raid on an apartment in Cairo, Reuters reports.

Ezzat was an influential former deputy to Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie, and was seen as a hardliner within the group. He became acting leader after Badie’s arrest in August 2013.

An interior ministry statement said Ezzat had been arrested from an apartment used as a hide-out in Cairo’s Fifth Settlement district, and was accused of joining and leading a terrorist group and receiving illicit funds.

Ezzat had previously been sentenced to death and to life in prison in absentia. According to Egyptian law, he will face retrials in the cases following his arrest.

The Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed and designated a terrorist organization in Egypt in December 2013, several months after the ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, following mass protests against his rule.

Since Morsi’s ouster, Egyptian authorities have launched a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters. As part of the crackdown, thousands of Brotherhood supporters have been jailed and the group was blacklisted as a terrorist organization.

In 2018, Egypt passed a law to oversee the freezing of assets of “terrorists” and “terrorist groups”.

Following the approval of that law, the assets of more than 1,000 charities tied to the Muslim Brotherhood were frozen.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)