On February 12, 1949, two gunmen shot down 43-year old Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna as he stood waiting for a taxi cab in Cairo. It was a classic revenge killing carried out with the tacit approval of the Egyptian government, which blamed Banna for the recent assassination of prime minister Mahmud Fihmi al-Nokrashi Pasha.
Pasha had been been gunned down two months earlier, by a 21-year old fanatic from the Brotherhood. Egyptian authorities wrongly believed that by eliminating the party founder, they would rid themselves from headache of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Cairo had not realized that the Muslim Brotherhood had long outgrown the cult figure of one man and would live long - longer than every Egyptian regime since then - long enough, in fact, to run for the parliamentary elections that are taking place in Egypt today, 62-years later.
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