Cairo – Mohamed al-Zawahiri, brother of al-Qaeda’s second highest commander, was arrested two days after he released from custody in Egypt, a security source said Sunday. Mohamed al-Zawahiri, who was re-arrested on Saturday, had spent more than 10 years in prison.   An Egyptian court tried him in absentia in 1998 and sentenced him to death.  He will face military prosecution to re-asses procedures taken during his 1998 case, the security source said. 

Mohamed al-Zawahiri is known to have been a military commander in the terrorist

network Islamic Jihad, leading the group’s activities in Bosnia and Albania during the Balkan wars in the 1990s.   His brother, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is Osama bin Laden’s top deputy in the al-Qaeda network.   The brothers are believed to have led the Islamic Jihad movement in Egypt.  (more)

BACKGROUND: Muhammad Al-Zawahiri, the younger brother of Ayman Al Zawahiri, was born in Egypt in 1953.    A 1974 Muhammad Al-Zawahiri graduated the engineering college at Cairo University and then moved to Saudi Arabia and took work with a construction firm.    In 1981, his name was among those indicted in absentia for the assassination of the Egyptian President Anwar Saadat, on 10/06/1981, but he was found not guilty of the charge.

Muhammad Al-Zawahiri joined the World Islamic Relief Organization, and traveled to Indonesia, Bosnia and Malawi.   Married with six children, he moved in the early 90s’ to Yemen with his family, and then, in the mid 90s’, joined his older brother, Ayman Al Zawahiri in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where Jihadi activists begun to congregate. But after the group was forced to leave, following the execution of the teenaged son of Ahmad Salamah Mabruk, Ayman went to Afghanistan while Muhammad Al-Zawahiri took his family back to Yemen and began working with engineering contractors.

In 04/1999 Muhammad Al-Zawahiri was arrested in Yemen and extradited to Egypt following information obtained from the ALBANIAN-TRIAL in Cairo.    Muhammad Al-Zawahiri’s wife didn’t contact the Egyptian embassy in Sanaa until 10/1999, and they confirmed his arrest.   For several years, no news were released on Muhammad Al-Zawahiri and his family presumed he had been executed in accordance with the sentence from the trial. In 10/2001, the United States requested a sample of his DNA to match against bodies found in Afghan caves hoping to identify one of the bodies as belonging to his older brother Ayman Al Zawahiri.    In 02/2004, the Sharq al-Awsat newspaper announced that they had discovered Muhammad Al-Zawahiri was still alive and being held in Tora prison, which was confirmed the following month by the Egyptian Interior Ministry, who added that he could be visited by his family.   Egypt announced they were re-convening a new tribunal to look at his case.

After the Egyptian revolution in Feb 2011,  Muhammad Al-Zawahiri was among a large contingent of prisoners released by Egyptian officials in March.   However, the reason for his re-arrest only three days later remains a mystery.