Son Of Egypt Election Candidate Killed

(NewsCore) - The son of an independent candidate in Egypt's parliamentary election was stabbed to death on the eve of the vote as he was putting up posters of his father in Cairo, relatives and a medic said Sunday.

Two men attacked Omar Sayyed Sayyed, 24, on Saturday night in the Matariya district of the capital and stabbed him to death, family members said.

A security official said police had arrested both attackers who had confessed to killing Sayyed.

He insisted they had committed the murder because Sayyed was flirting with the sister of one of them.

But the relatives of the dead man denied this, saying the attack was politically motivated and that it occurred while Sayyed was putting up posters.

Sayyed's father, Sayyed Sayyed Mohammed, is an independent candidate in Sunday's parliamentary poll, which is expected to strengthen the ruling party and further weaken its harried Islamist opposition.

Security was beefed up in some areas after activists clashed Friday with police at the end of a campaign overshadowed by violence and the arrests of more than 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

Polling stations opened at 8:00 am local time, but initial indications showed a low turnout in the country of 80 million people, where 41 million hold the right to vote.

Polls are traditionally eyed with suspicion, with past elections marked by deadly clashes between police and protesters and battles between knife-wielding thugs hired by rival candidates.

While several dozen people milled around a polling station in Cairo's Shubra el-Khaima district, other voting sites in the capital and Egypt's second city, Alexandria, drew far smaller numbers.

In Suez, witnesses said hundreds of supporters of Brotherhood and other opposition candidates demonstrated outside police headquarters to protest at not being allowed to enter the polling station.

Police, meanwhile, said they used teargas to disperse clashes between supporters of rival candidates outside polling stations in Qena, about 300 miles south of Cairo, and against supporters of independent candidates in Gharbiya in the Nile Delta.

A Muslim Brotherhood spokesman said police and government supporters fired live rounds during the clashes. Security officials said gunfire came from candidates' supporters.

Polling stations were due to close at 7:00 pm, with the first results expected Monday in an election closely watched for an indication of how the government will conduct the far more important presidential election in 2011.

The NDP is widely expected to win a solid majority of the 508 elected seats and to make further gains when President Hosni Mubarak fills the 10 remaining seats with his appointees.

Much attention focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, the only serious organised opposition, which was predicted to win far fewer seats than in the last election in 2005.

The Brotherhood fielded 130 candidates, compared with around 800 for the NDP, after the election committee disqualified more than a dozen of them. The group registered its candidates as independents to circumvent a ban on religious parties.

Eleven Brotherhood supporters were sentenced this week to two years in jail for handing out the group's leaflets and campaigning. Egypt bans using religious slogans in campaigns, a hallmark of the Islamist group.

Rights activists criticized the crackdown, and condemned voting in Egypt as routinely spoiled by fraud at the ballot box. The claim was denied by the government, which has pledged to hold a fair vote.

Local civil society groups complained that the authorities rejected requests for thousands of permits to monitor the vote and the count, while the electoral commission said it granted more than 6,000 permits. Egypt does not allow foreign election observers.

www.myfoxla.com