World Bulletin / News Desk

A Muslim Brotherhood leader said Thursday that his movement would not cooperate with an inquiry into events that followed the ouster of elected president Mohamed Morsi last year.

"Our position on the inquiry remains unchanged," Gamal Heshmat, a member of the Brotherhood's Shura Council, told Anadolu Agency.

"There is no need for Egyptians living abroad to communicate with the inquiry as long as those who live inside Egypt believe it is politicized," Heshmat, who lives in self-imposed exile outside Egypt, added by phone.

Inquiry head Fouad Abdel-Moneim Riyad said Tuesday that his colleagues had asked Egyptian embassies abroad to open channels of communication with Brotherhood members living in their respective countries so they might testify on the events that followed last year's June 30 protests that led to Morsi's ouster by the army.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the movement from which Morsi hails, had earlier turned down an invitation to cooperate with the commission, citing the panel's earlier "disregard" for the group's point of view.

Last summer, Morsi supporters had staged a sit-in in eastern Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawiya Square to protest the elected leader's ouster by the military on July 3.

The violent dispersal of the sit-in, and that of a second sit-in in Giza's Nahda Square, left 632 people, including eight policemen, dead, according to Egypt's state-run National Council for Human Rights.

Other local and international human rights groups, however, said fatalities from the sit-in dispersal had exceeded 1,000.

Heshmat the commission – if it was serious about hearing the testimony of Brotherhood members in this regard – should have noted the large number of videos and written materials produced by local and international media about the events in question.