Man Suspected of Stabbing Nobel-Winner Is Arrested
Egyptian police have arrested the man they believe stabbed and wounded the country’s best-known novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz, security sources said today.
Mahfouz, 82, had an operation on Friday after the man, apparently a Muslim militant, stabbed him in the neck outside the writer’s Cairo apartment. Doctors say his condition is now good.
The prime suspect was arrested Saturday evening in one of a series of sweeps against what the security sources called terrorists, the usual official term for members of violent Muslim fundamentalist organizations.
Mahfouz, speaking about the incident on television on Saturday, said “terrorism” was an evil to be fought.
“I pray to God to make the police victorious over terrorism and to purify Egypt from this evil, in defense of people, freedom and Islam,” Mahfouz, in a croaky voice from his hospital bed, told Interior Minister Hassan Alfi.
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