CAIRO – Egypt’s new defense minister has retired 70 generals and removed other members of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces into retirement, BBC and Egypt’s al-Shorouk newspaper reported Sunday.The Egyptian daily said Minister of Defense and Military Production Colonel General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had made the decision ahead of a plan to form a new military council.The move comes weeks after Sisi assumed his post, in the wake of President Muhammad Mursi’s sacking of former defense minister Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and former forces chief of staff Sami Anan.In that surprise announcement, Mursi also scrapped a key constitutional document which gave the military legislative powers. Mursi and the army have had an uneasy relationship, in which observers say there is behind-the-scenes grappling between the first civilian president in Egypt’s history and a military that had moved to limit his power.In addition to the generals he reportedly dismissed, the paper said Sisi removed six SCAF members: Mamdouh Abdel Hakk, Ismail Etman, Mohsen al-Fangari, Sami Diab, Adel Emara, and Mokhtar al-Mulla, it said, citing unnamed sources. Those six members would, however, remain in the Armed Forces, the paper said.Sisi, the sources added, has not yet decided who is to succeed him as director of Military Intelligence and Reconnaissance, the position he held before being appointed minister of defense in August. According to the sources, former Defense Minister and SCAF head Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi brought back to work several senior army officers who had already retired.

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