Osama Yassin: Black box of the terrorist Brotherhood

Aya Ezz

Egypt’s Court of Cassation has upheld the death sentence against 12 accused leaders of the terrorist Brotherhood, including the leader Osama Yassin, in the case of organizing the armed Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in in 2013.

The accused, Osama Yassin Abdel Wahab, is among the Brotherhood leaders who held a ministerial position during the era of late ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

According to the prosecution’s investigations and the charges brought against him, Yassin was the field official of the Brotherhood during the January 25, 2011 revolution, as the group presented him as a model for young people. He was also accused of torturing and killing citizens in the January revolution through what is known as the Brotherhood 95 Division in the attack known as the Battle of the Camel.

In his meeting with Brotherhood broadcaster Ahmed Mansour on the Qatari Al-Jazeera channel, Yassin admitted that the group’s members were on the roofs of residential buildings in Tahrir Square during the January revolution to protect them, and that they were carrying wooden planks to protect themselves.

“If they had caught a thug in the building, he would come down from the building due to a lot of dragging and beating, and as soon as he got out of the building, the rest of the young people would pick him up and complete the beating,” he said.

Yassin said about the Brotherhood 95 Division, “We have the Brotherhood 95 Division, and this is a group of the group’s youth whose mission was to cleanse the buildings of the thugs who were controlling them.”

Osama Yassin was born in 1964, entered the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University and specialized in pediatrics. He joined the Brotherhood in 1985, after which he took many organizational positions within the group, which brought the group push him in the parliament elections after the January revolution.

The last organizational position that Yassin assumed after January 2011 was a member of the administrative office of the Brotherhood in downtown Cairo, where he was the media spokesman for the office.

During Morsi’s era, Yassin took over the Ministry of Youth and Sports, where he failed greatly. At that time, he transformed the clubs into training halls for Brotherhood youth and made most divisions of the ministry subservient to the terrorist group.

Osama Yassin is called the “black box” of the terrorist group due to his closeness to the decision-making circle within it.

The security forces arrested him on August 26, 2013, inside a villa in the Fifth Settlement. He was hiding with a Brotherhood leader named Ibrahim al-Aqeed, and he was accompanied by Mohamed Hafez, secretary of detained Brotherhood leader Khairat al-Shater.