Egyptian prosecutors are investigating allegations that a puppet that speaks nonsensically in an ad for a multinational phone company was sending coded instructions to Islamic terrorists.
Prosecutors said that officials from Vodafone Egypt were summoned about the ad filed by a video-blogger and singer who calls himself Ahmed Spider.
In an appearance on Egyptian television on Tuesday, Spider spent nearly an hour dissecting what he called the secret codes embedded in the ad.
In the ad, a puppet widow named Abla Fahita tries to reactivate the phone line used by her late husband.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the ad shows the Muppet-like Abla Fahita babbling to a friend on the phone while her daughter, Karkoura, looks for her dead father's SIM card.
Ahmed Spider said that the opening image of the ad, a four-pronged cactus decorated for Christmas, was intended to inspire attacks on Coptic Christians when they celebrate the holiday next week, the report said.
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A red ornament on the cactus represented a bomb, and the number of branches was a reference to the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo, where hundreds of Islamists were killed in August when the security forces attacked a sit-in - Rabaa means "fourth" in Arabic, it added.
The company explained in a statement that the ad, first broadcast and posted on YouTube last week, was part of a marketing campaign 'aiming at explaining how to reactivate a Vodafone SIM card', the report added.
