IT IS an unlikely setting from which to launch a fightback against Egypt's new military rulers.

But a cramped flat above a disused kebab shop in North London has become the focal point of the Muslim Brotherhood's effort to regroup after President Mohamed Morsi was forced from office and his movement declared a terrorist organisation.

In Cairo the organisation is facing one of the toughest crackdowns in decades: thousands of supporters have been arrested, while organisations linked with the Brotherhood have had their assets confiscated. Mr Morsi, who was Egypt's first democratically elected president, faces trial for alleged treason, and he has been joined in the country's notorious jails by the group's supreme guide and most of its senior leadership.

The handful of senior figures that remain free have fled into exile, and have chosen London as a base from which to rebuild the organisation.

The London office, in the suburb of Cricklewood, is being run by relatives of two of Mr Morsi's arrested aides, who were seized along with the former president when troops entered his inner sanctum last July to announce that his time was up.