Egyptian police captured senior Muslim Brotherhood official Mohamed El-Beltagi yesterday, security sources said, as they pressed on with a crackdown that has put most of the Islamist group’s top leaders behind bars.

Beltagi had urged Egyptians to join rallies against the military today, in a recorded statement aired by the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera TV news network this week.

Since deposing President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government on July 3, the military-backed authorities have killed hundreds of pro-Morsi protesters and arrested the bulk of the Brotherhood’s leaders in what they call a fight against terrorism.

The Brotherhood’s top leader, Mohamed Badie, and his deputies Khairat al-Shater and Rashad Bayoumy have already been put on trial on charges including incitement to violence in connection with a protest on July 8, in a prosecution they dismiss as politically motivated.

Security sources say 53 protesters died in the pre-dawn clash along with four members of the security forces. The army says “terrorists” provoked the shooting by attacking its troops.

Beltagi was a prominent speaker at a pro-Morsi protest camp at the Rabaa Adawiya mosque that was smashed by the security forces on August 14, on a day when more than 600 people died, most of them Brotherhood supporters shot by police.

Meanwhile with the Brotherhood out, old order seems to be shaping Egypt’s future as, after a stunning reversal in which the army seized upon a tide of public discontent to overthrow freely elected President Mohamed Morsi, the powerful state apparatus appears to have all but neutralised the Muslim Brotherhood to which he belongs.

In a highly symbolic victory for the old guard, the 85-year-old former president Hosni Mubarak was released from jail last week, albeit to await a retrial for ordering the killing of protesters in 2011. (Reuters)