Hillary Clinton handed out bribes for Islamist votes, claims leading Egyptian feminist

Egypt's most prominent feminist writer has claimed that Hillary Clinton personally handed out electoral bribes in the streets of Egypt during the 2012 presidential elections.

Nawal al-Saadawi made the claim at a talk in Sweden in this week, The New Arab's Arabic language service reported.

"I remember I saw Hillary Clinton herself in Tahrir Square giving US dollars to young people to elect the Muslim Brotherhood," the 86-year-old said.

"Why is the US interested with the local government and electing the Muslim Brotherhood? The local and global powers collaborated to bring the Brotherhood to power," she claimed without evidence.

The Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi was democratically elected in 2012 following the overthrow of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The next year, Morsi was toppled by in a military coup amid protests against his rule.

Saadawi, who has been described as the Arab world's leading feminist, has long been an opponent of political Islam and backed the overthrow of the Egypt's first freely elected leader by current general-turned-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

This is not the first time she has lashed out at Hillary Clinton, who was US Secretary of State at the time of the 2012 elections.

"There are women like Clinton and [British Prime Minister] Theresa May and Condoleezza Rice who are more patriarchal than the men," Saadawi said in an interview with Newsweek in June.

Conspiracy theories, including some floated by President Donald Trump, Clinton's rival in the 2016 US elections, have previously alleged links between Clinton and the Muslim Brotherhood, but she has denied such claims.

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