20100904
africanews

CAIRO (Reuters) - Activists launched this week a poster campaign backing Egypt's intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman for the 2011 presidency, a move to head off an ongoing campaign for President Hosni Mubarak's son as the next leader.

But within hours of plastering posters on bridges and walls of Cairo's streets, online coverage of the Suleiman campaign was halted with no explanation, a move one publishing expert attributed to official efforts to prevent the campaign spreading.

Talk that Gamal Mubarak, 46, could succeed his father has gathered momentum since the president had surgery in March in Germany and because of a poster campaign backing him in 2011.

Officials deny any role in the campaign backing Gamal.

But the pro-Suleiman campaign aimed to derail support for the president's son and sought to show divisions existed between the army and his business allies.

In a statement issued online but which was later withdrawn the pro-Suleiman anonymous activists appealed to Egypt's "honourable army" to save the country from "the shame and disgrace of succession which the president's son seeks".

"The way to deal with the succession project of Gamal Mubarak and his business clout, is for Omar Suleiman to lead a transitional government," they said.

Analysts have long thought Suleiman, who is in his mid-70s and known to be a close family friend of the Mubaraks, was a likely successor. But he has never expressed any wish to run for president.