Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
A demonstrator in Cairo on Thursday tried to remove part of a wall near the palace where President Mohamed Morsi resides.
CAIRO — A prosecutor in Cairo is accusing aides to President Mohamed Morsi of applying political pressure to an investigation into the bloody street fighting last week outside the presidential palace, in order to corroborate Islamists’ claims about a conspiracy that paid thugs to use violence against them.
The complaints by the prosecutor, Mustafa Khater, have raised some of the most serious questions to date about the Morsi government’s commitment to the impartial rule of law, as well as about its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group whose political arm the president once led.
Since the clashes last week, accounts have appeared of Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters detaining and abusing dozens of opponents, whom they captured and kept tied up overnight by the gates of the palace. A spokesman for Mr. Morsi said the president was not responsible for those events and had ordered an investigation.
If Mr. Khater’s accusations, detailed in a memorandum to senior judicial authorities that circulated widely on Thursday, are borne out, they would suggest that the president’s chief of staff was directly involved in what happened to the captives.
The events resonate against the backdrop of the political battle raging in Egypt over a draft constitution and the referendum on it that is scheduled for Saturday.
Mr. Morsi’s allies argue that the new charter will usher in a government of institutions and laws, but critics say it will provide too little protection for individual freedom. They see ominous hints of authoritarianism in Mr. Morsi’s attempt three weeks ago to claim unchecked powers until the referendum, saying that he was putting himself above the law for a short time to keep his political opponents from using the courts to block the referendum.
Mr. Morsi’s first use of those broadened powers was to replace the country’s chief prosecutor, arguing that he had protected corrupt former officials and cronies from the overthrown government of Hosni Mubarak.
The local Cairo prosecutor’s accusations on Thursday suggest that Mr. Morsi may have merely replaced one politicized national chief prosecutor with another.
A spokesman for Mr. Morsi denied on Thursday that the president had meddled in the investigation of the events outside the palace.
“The presidency does not interfere or comment on the judiciary,” the spokesman, Khaled al-Qazzaz, said in an e-mail.
Defense lawyers confirmed elements of Mr. Khater’s account. During last Wednesday’s street fight, thousands of Islamist supporters of the president battled similar numbers of his opponents for hours with thrown rocks and occasional gunshots, and Islamists captured and detained dozens of their opponents. It is unclear how many of the captors belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood or more hard-line groups. But videos, corroborated by the accounts of victims, indicated that the vigilante jailers tried to bully their prisoners into confessing that they were paid to use violence as part of a conspiracy against the president.
Mr. Khater wrote that around dawn the next day, he received a phone call from Mr. Morsi’s newly appointed public prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, who said that “49 thugs” had been arrested and detained outside a gate to the palace. Mr. Khater said that when he arrived at the scene, the president’s chief of staff, Refaa al-Tahtawi, displayed guns, knives and other implements along with a document stating that the Islamists had confiscated the weapons from the captives.
All 49 captives had been beaten, he wrote. They said that members of the Muslim Brotherhood had tried to coerce them into confessing that they had taken money to commit violence. But prosecutors found no evidence that they had done so.
Even so, Mr. Morsi declared in a televised speech later that night that prosecutors had obtained confessions.
Still, officials from the chief prosecutor’s office requested a “firm” response in the case, Mr. Khater wrote, and the officials later pressed Mr. Khater to at least order the detention of a group of poor and unemployed prisoners.
When Mr. Khater nonetheless released them all, Mr. Abdullah “reprimanded him,” according to the memorandum, and the following day ordered him transferred to the obscure town of Beni Suef in Upper Egypt.
“The transfer was in fact a punishment for a violation that I haven’t committed, and constitutes an explicit threat to the entire team working on the case,” Mr. Khater wrote.
On Thursday, the transfer was canceled and Mr. Khater was restored to his former position in Cairo without explanation.
Mr. Khater, Mr. Tahtawi and Mr. Abdullah could not be reached for comment.
