40 students expelled from Police Academy for MB affiliations

Forty students were expelled from the Police Academy for allegedly belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, the state-owned Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported Tuesday.

Interior Ministry Spokesperson Hany Abdel Latif told MENA that investigations showed that the students, in their third and fourth years at the academy, belong to the banned Islamist organization.

Their relatives have also “participated in the terrorist organization’s practices,” according to the spokesperson.

Last year, the Police Academy’s disciplinary council also expelled two students after it was proven they belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, as evidenced in their posts on social media, according to MENA.

Since Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in 2013, hundreds of university students across Egypt have been suspended for their alleged role in on-campus violence and protests.

Mohamed Nagui, a researcher in the academic freedoms unit at the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE), told Mada Masr previously that it has been very difficult to identify the exact number of suspended students, as they span a number of faculties in almost every university in Egypt, and that the authorities haven’t released any official statistics.

Since 2013, more than 14 students have been killed in clashes with security forces during on-campus confrontations, and thousands more arrested, in the worst crackdown on campus freedoms in the last 70 years, according to estimations by AFTE.