Mohamed ElBaradei Named Interim Prime Minister Of Egypt
Former United Nations weapons inspection group head Mohamed ElBaradei has been named the interim Prime Minister of Egypt:
Leading liberal Egyptian politician Mohamed ElBaradei is to be named prime minister of a new caretaker government, his supporters say.
Mena state news agency says he met interim President Adly Mahmud Mansour, three days after the army removed Islamist leader Mohammed Morsi amid growing nationwide unrest.
The move has in turn triggered mass unrest by supporters of Mr Morsi.
Mr ElBaradei is a former head of the UN nuclear watchdog.
He and other party leaders attended a meeting called by Mr Mansour on Saturday.
Mr ElBaradei leads an alliance of liberal and left-wing parties, the National Salvation Front.
A spokesman for the front told AP news agency that Mr Mansour would swear him in as prime minister on Saturday evening.
In a BBC interview on Thursday, Mr ElBaradei defended the army’s intervention, saying: “We were between a rock and a hard place.”
“It is a painful measure, nobody wanted that,” he said. “But Mr Morsi unfortunately undermined his own legitimacy by declaring himself a few months ago as a pharaoh and then we got into a fist fight, and not a democratic process.”
ElBaradei was also among those Egyptian leaders who stood with the head of the Egyptian Army on Wednesday evening when he announced that Mohammed Morsi had been deposed and that the Army was stepping back into the political process. Indeed one expects that he will be one of the people that will be looked at as a potential Presidential candidate when elections for that office take place at some point in the future.
![Military Coup Underway In Egypt [Update: Morsi Deposed]](https://otb.cachefly.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/egypt-flag3-512x256.gif)
I don’t know how we can trust a man who, in a dozen years as head of the IAEA, never managed to find those Iraqi WMD to run a country.