Egypt's highest-profile terror suspect is a puppet made of felt. No, really.

MUPPETS of the world unite! One of your brethren in Egypt has taken to TV in a fight to save her stuffing after being accused of being a secret terrorist agent.

In the midst of an Egypt-wide crackdown on dissent against the trouble-torn nation's military imposed government, Abla Fahita - a felt puppet - took to the airwaves yesterday to deny allegations that her appearance in a recent Vodafone commercial carried veiled bomb threats and coded messages to the banned Muslim Brotherhood movement.

The allegation highlight's a growing mood of paranoia in Egypt, with recent mass arrests following an ongoing series of bombings and violent protests.

"I am a comedic character," Fahita, said in a Skype interview with Egypt's CBC network.

In the allegedly illicit ad, Fahita chats on the phone about how to recover her late husband's SIM card, somehow lost at a shopping mall. She suggests using a sniffer dog.

The gossipy widow hand puppet was accused by a youth activist as using the sniffer-dog reference as a coded message to order an attack on a shopping complex.

The references don't end there, accuser "Ahmed Spider" asserts. A cactus-tree adorned with Christmas ornaments is a "clear" threat against Christianity, with its ornaments being symbols of "bombs".

He filed a complaint which was quickly passed to specialist terrorism prosecutors.

The Associated Press said it received an e-mail from Vodafone that called Spider's interpretation of the ad "mere imagination."

Nevertheless, the regional manager of Vodafone Egypt has been forced to front state security prosecution officers in order to explain the meaning of Abla Fahita.

The official investigation into the puppet has been widely mocked.

A Twitter stream, #FreeFahita has been created to battle for the comedic-character's cause.

But, a media release from the Egyptian Ministry Of Interior shows just how seriously the claims are being taken.

#Egypt has saved the world from a big terrorist threat not seen since the Muppets tried to take Manhattan #AblaFahita pic.twitter.com/SwAp9aoZe5 — Amro Ali (@_amroali) January 2, 2014

"The pages of Abla Fahita was using unknown symbols and codes whether secretly or publicly which is against the state's policy and what the law warned of. We do not know whether if these are true symbols or fake symbols in order to confuse the state's apparatus either ways it is against the law. The administrators of Abla Fahita should be questioned according to the law and we are waiting the prosecution's warrant to arrest those administrators and those who cooperated with them. FYI those administrators are well known to security."

The background to the impending case is no joke.

The Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement are supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. The group was last week banned as a terrorist group.

International concern has been growing the increasingly harsh crackdown on freedom of speech and dissent against the interim government which was installed after a popular uprising in mid 2013.

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