Egyptian Suspect a Source of Pride to Family, Friends

In a stuffy stucco housing project overlooking the railroad tracks, neighbors continued to fret Saturday over the fate of the man they called, with some reverence, “Dr. Magdy.”

Magdy el-Nashar, a 33-year-old biochemist, had arrived at his parents’ home on vacation from Britain on June 30. Glowing with pride, his mother walked him door to door to greet the neighbors. El-Nashar, seized last week as a suspect in the July 7 suicide bombings in London, wore Western slacks and button-downs instead of traditional dress, and his face was shaven clean, friends said.

“His mother was so happy,” said Om Karim, a 38-year-old woman who lives one floor beneath the El-Nashars. “She said he’d just received his PhD from abroad, and we were also very happy.”

Life is arduous in the tumbledown tenements and slapdash shacks of Cairo’s southern slums, and in the scruffy corridors of the apartment building, El-Nashar’s story had shone as a flash of hard-sought upward mobility.

In El-Nashar’s neighborhood, the dirt roads are prone to sewage overflows and heaped with decaying tires and broken bits of rusting machinery. Roosters strut, and emaciated dogs poke in the garbage. Even the scrawny trees are streaked with dust.

But El-Nashar, whose father is a retired office worker at a large construction firm, was determined to get ahead, neighbors said.

He attended a French school. He even impressed neighbors by bringing home German girls he’d befriended while growing up.

“He was romantic,” said Hisham Abdel Hamid, a 34-year-old friend. “He had affairs with girls. He’d stay up late and go to parties. He didn’t have any political affiliations.”

Like other longtime neighbors, Abdel Hamid described El-Nashar as religious but not a religious extremist.

During his college years at Cairo University, he practiced kung fu and tutored neighborhood boys in English and French, they said. He also was said to have joined a moderate Islamic student organization that held prayers and lectures.

“He was so smart,” Abdel Hamid said. “He could look at a book and memorize it by heart.”

After college, El-Nashar won a government scholarship, enabling him to earn a master’s degree in chemistry. He completed his work at the National Research Center in Cairo, where he specialized in developing anti-corrosive paint, friends said. After that, they said, he won another government scholarship, which he used to pursue doctorate studies in the United States.

“He’s very shy. When you talk to him he looks down, always down,” said Ahmed Faizallah, a biochemist who has been a close friend of El-Nashar since the two were students.

El-Nashar didn’t last at North Carolina State University, leaving a few months after beginning his studies in 2000. “He didn’t like the situation there,” Faizallah said. “He sent me an e-mail that I never forgot. He said that the United States was a big joke.”

El-Nashar transferred to the University of Leeds, where he studied controlled-release antibiotics. In contrast to his melancholy in the United States, he appeared to thrive in his new environment.

“He liked Britain very much. He said he’d like to stay there forever,” Faizallah said. “He found it a very multicultural society. He was living in an almost Islamic city. He didn’t feel a stranger there.”

El-Nashar married an Egyptian woman in 2001, his friends said. Faizallah was surprised to learn of the wedding. “Magdy is very secretive,” he said.

She, too, was religious, friends said. The couple has a daughter, a 3-year-old who lives with her mother, the friends said, adding that the marriage didn’t last.

“He had a lot of trouble in the marriage. They were fighting all the time,” Faizallah said. “Nobody expected that Magdy would have this trouble. He’s a very cool, calm guy.”

El-Nashar lost “a lot of money” in the divorce, Faizallah said, but was hoping for a fresh start. He planned to spend the coming years working in Britain. He had already bought a return ticket for Aug. 10 and had a job offer from a British pharmaceutical company, he told Faizallah.

“He looked great,” Faizallah said. “He’d gained some weight. His face was glowing. He looked very happy.”

Staffers at the National Research Center seemed so convinced of El-Nashar’s innocence that they spent hours Saturday discussing how they might lobby the government for his release, Faizallah said.

“If you talk to him, really, I am sure you’ll say he’s innocent,” he said. “He is just living a religious life, and this is not a crime.”

El-Nashar was arrested Thursday afternoon after praying at a mosque a stone’s throw from his parents’ house, friends and relatives said.

Refaat Abdel Hamid, who works cutting marble blocks at a local factory, also was at prayers that day. Three unmarked cars parked outside the mosque and about a dozen plainclothes agents were inside.

“They waited until the prayers were over, and then some of them went into the mosque and politely escorted Magdy into one of the cars,” he said.

Lawyer Mamdouh Ismail said he would soon file a request to the public prosecutor for El-Nashar’s release. If there are charges against him, the government should announce them and allow defense lawyers to attend the interrogations, the Cairo attorney said.

“I’m sure he is innocent,” the lawyer said. “I’ve been following closely Islamic groups in Egypt for 25 years, and his name never surfaced in any case or among any militant circle. I’ve never heard of him before the attacks.”

Besides, Ismail said, “if he was a militant, he would have never come back to Egypt. This is the most cooperative country in counter-Islamism. It’s no secret they would have arrested and tortured him, and even handed him back to the British.”

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Times staff writer Hossam Hamalawy contributed to this report.