Egypt Asks Death for Nasser’s Son in Shootings

Egypt’s chief prosecutor said Thursday he will seek the death penalty for the son of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser and 10 other people charged in a series of shooting attacks on U.S. and Israeli diplomats.

Prosecutor General Mohammed Guindi announced the indictment of 20 people in the shootings.

Nasser’s eldest son, Khaled Abdel Nasser, a 38-year-old engineer now in self-exile in Yugoslavia, and 10 other defendants will be tried for their lives by a high state security court. They are charged with murder, attempted murder and attempting to undermine Egypt’s internal security and relationships with the United States and Israel.

The additional nine defendants, among them Nasser’s nephew, Gamal Shawky Abdel Nasser, face prison sentences up to life. The indictment accuses them of complicity and covering up knowledge of criminal activity.

No Extradition Treaty

While Khaled Nasser is in Yugoslavia, Nasser’s nephew, a physician, is in Britain. Egypt has no extradition treaty with either country, and Guindi said Egypt will seek help from the international police agency Interpol to catch them.

The charges grew out of four attacks in four consecutive years on U.S. and Israeli diplomats by gunmen in speeding cars. Two Israeli diplomats were killed and six others were wounded in shootings between 1984 and 1986. Two U.S. diplomats were wounded in the last of the attacks in May, 1987.

All the attacks were followed by typewritten statements or telephone calls to foreign news service offices in Cairo claiming responsibility for a group calling itself Egypt’s Revolution. The statements opposed Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, attacked the United States, reflected pro-Libyan leanings and professed a pan-Arab Nasserite ideology.

It was one of the key defendants who reportedly broke the case by contacting the U.S. Embassy with an offer to sell information about the group. Embassy officials interrogated him extensively, then handed him to Egyptian authorities, according to Egyptian press accounts.

The indictment listed Nasser’s son, a professor at Cairo University’s Engineering School, as the second defendant after Mahmoud Ali Suliman, 47, a businessman and former administrator at the Egyptian Embassy in London.

It said the two and Suliman’s younger brother Ahmed founded Egypt’s Revolution “with the aim of committing murder . . . and hostile acts” against the United States and Israel.

In addition to helping form an illegal secret group, Khaled Nasser was accused of financing it and supplying other “material aid” including firearms, three hand grenades, bulletproof vests and disguise paraphernalia. He was not charged with participating in the shootings.