Khairat el-Shater (4 May 1950-) was the Deputy Supreme Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood under Mohammed Badie. el-Shater ran for the Freedom and Justice Party during the 2012 presidential elections of Egypt after the Egyptian Revolution, but due to an arrest a year earlier, he was disqualified.
Biography[]
Khairat el-Shater was born in Dakhalia, Kingdom of Egypt on 4 May 1950. At 16, he joined the Egyptian Arab Socialist Union during Gamal Abdel Nasser's tenure as president of Egypt, although he took part in the February 1968 student protests against the government while studying engineering at Alexandria University. He became a lecturer at Mansoura University after getting a master's degree, but in 1981 he was exiled from Egypt as an Islamic dissident after Anwar Sadat's assassination by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
He became a successful textile and furniture businessman with branches in Cairo's shopping malls, earning him a fortune of several millions. He was a strong advocate of privatization and free market, and was one of the candidates for the 2012 presidential elections. el-Shater became the Deputy Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood under Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie, and in May 2012 he was the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party in the Egyptian presidential elections. However, since he had been arrested in March 2011, he was disqualified; the Egyptian law dictated that presidential candidates could not have been arrested within six years before their election.
On 5 July 2013 he was arrested in the military coup d'etat of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi against the Islamist government of President Mohamed Morsi. On 28 February 2015 he was given a life sentence, while on 16 May 2015 he was sentenced to death for a separate case. On 16 June 2015, he was given the death sentence with two others.