Top officials from the Sisi administration gave Mohamed Mursi until the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to disband the Muslim Brotherhood or pay the price, according to a report by the Middle East Eye.
One Egyptian figure said: “ My analysis is that they decided to kill him at that particular time (the seventh anniversary of the second round of presidential elections). This explains the timing of his death. The main reason they decided to kill him was that they concluded he would never agree to their demands.”
The offer made to Mursi and other imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood leaders was outlined in a “strategic document,” which was seen by several Egyptian opposition sources and prepared by senior officials close to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The government document titled “Closing the file of the Muslim Brotherhood” stated that the organization had been weakened by the 2013 military coup and that its main problem was the number of political prisoners, which amounts to around 60,000, including those from secular and Islamist factions.
The document depicted that the Brotherhood would be disbanded within three years. Prisoners would be offered better jail conditions if they agreed and harsher sentences if they refused.
“The Egyptian government wanted to keep this negotiation as secret as possible. They did not want Mursi to confer with colleagues,” one source said.
Mursi in turn refused to discuss the closing down of the organization, recognize the military coup nor would he renounce his title as elected president of Egypt.
“This continued for some time. Efforts were intensified in Ramadan. The regime became frustrated and they made it clear to other leaders that unless they persuaded him to give up and negotiate by the end of Ramadan, the regime would take other actions.”
Former Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, the first democratically elected head of state in Egypt's modern history, died last week from a heart attack after collapsing in a Cairo court while on trial on espionage charges, authorities and a medical source said.
The 67-year-old Mursi, a top figure in the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, had been in jail since being toppled by the military in 2013 after barely a year in power, following mass protests against his rule.
