CAIRO — Egypt said Sunday that members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, trained by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, carried out the bombing in Cairo that killed Egypt’s top prosecutor last summer.
Egypt’s interior minister, Maj. Gen. Magdi Abdel-Ghaffar, described at a news conference an elaborate plot to kill the prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, that he linked to exiled Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Turkey and a Hamas training camp in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas immediately denied the charges on Sunday. In June, at the time of the bombing, the Muslim Brotherhood denied any involvement in the killing of the prosecutor.
“These statements are untrue and do not bode well for ongoing efforts to develop ties between Hamas and Cairo,” Samy Abu Zahri, a Hamas spokesman, said in a statement published on the group’s website.
Mr. Barakat, who spearheaded the prosecution and mass trials of thousands of Islamists, was killed when a car bomb containing more than 175 pounds of explosives was detonated as his vehicle drove through a Cairo suburb on June 29.
Mr. Barakat was the most senior official to be killed in Egypt in 25 years. The assassination prompted President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to introduce a sweeping antiterrorism law that expanded the powers of Egypt’s security forces and restricted civil liberties.
The killing was part of a wave of attacks against government officials and the security forces that followed the military’s ouster of the elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, in the summer of 2013.
After the removal of Mr. Morsi, the government outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, killed hundreds of its supporters at a demonstration in Cairo and jailed thousands more. Many Muslim Brotherhood leaders fled into exile to Turkey.
On Sunday, General Abdel-Ghaffar, the interior minister, said the authorities had arrested 48 Muslim Brotherhood supporters across Egypt in connection with various plots to attack government targets, including 14 suspected of being involved in the assassination of Mr. Barakat.
General Abdel-Ghaffar accused Yahia Moussa, a Health Ministry spokesman under Mr. Morsi, of coordinating the attack from Turkey, and said the suspects had received military and explosives training at a Hamas-run camp in the Gaza Strip.
The men were sent back into Egypt with the help of Bedouin smugglers in the Sinai Peninsula and communicated with their handlers using the Internet, General Abdel-Ghaffar said.
The minister played videotaped confessions, with English subtitles, in which several accused men described their role in the attack.
Human rights groups have frequently criticized Egypt’s judicial system, which they say relies heavily on flawed evidence and the use of forced confessions.
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