Mohamed Nasr: The academic founding al-Furqan Brigades

Sara Rashad

The TV drama “Choice” which was aired during the Islamic month of Ramadan on Egyptian and Arab TV channels tackled a large number of the radicals who manipulated the terror scene during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt in 2012.

Mohamed Nasr, the founder of what came to be known as the al-Furqan Brigades, was one of these figures.

The brigades were founded during the Rabaa al-Adaqiya sit-in in eastern Cairo. It staged a number of terrorist attacks, including an attack on a ship transiting the Suez Canal.

Nasr was a professor at the College of Agriculture at the Suez Canal University. He sponsored a large number of master’s and doctoral students in the university.

Born in al-Arish, Nasr started demonstrating radical thinking in 2007. This was why he was arrested and thrown in jail. However, he released four months later.

He developed his radical ideology between 2007 and 2011. When the 2011 uprising erupted, Nasr joined a group of people in backing Salafist Sheikh Hazem Abu Ismail.

He was appointed as the spokesman of the Hazemoun Group, a group of fans of the same man. During this period, he met Hani Mustafa Amer, the second-in-command in the al-Furqan Brigades.

Both men formed the brigades following a brawl between Nasr and Abu Ismail, according to Amer.

He told his investigators that their brigades had an educational goal in the beginning, but then formed cluster terrorist cells.

The brigades, he said, invited the members of the Hazemoun group to join in.

The members of the group trained in the use of arms on the basis that the Muslim Brotherhood rule violated the Islamic religion.

Nasr used his ties with the Palestinian faction Hamas to convince it to provide his group with arms. Hamas also trained the members of the al-Furqan Brigades.

The dispersal of the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in was a turning point for the brigades which decided to start staging terrorist attacks at the national level.

The brigades started doing this by targeting the ships transiting the Suez Canal.