Egyptian police said they arrested a senior figure and key financier of the banned Muslim Brotherhood on Thursday.

Egyptian police said they arrested a senior figure and key financier of the banned Muslim Brotherhood on Thursday.

Businessman Hassan Malek was detained at his home in a suburb of Cairo, police sources said.

"The prosecution issued an arrest warrant for him, as he is implicated in several judicial cases," an interior ministry source said without elaborating.

In 2006, Malek was arrested under former president Hosni Mubarak.

Two years later a military tribunal sentenced him to prison, along with another businessman and Brotherhood number two, Khairat al-Shater, for financing a banned organization.

While officially prohibited, the Brotherhood was tolerated under Mubarak and even ran candidates for office as independents.

Both men were freed in 2011 after the popular uprising that ousted Mubarak.

In 2013, then army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi overthrew Mubarak's successor, Mohammad Mursi, and totally proscribed the Brotherhood.

It also launched a crackdown on the group, in which many Islamists were killed, with thousands arrested and hundreds of them condemned to death in speedy mass trials.