Cape Town — Egypt's new leader took office on Thursday as leading Islamists were imprisoned in the wake of the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned administration.

Aswat Masriya reported that the head of the country's Constitutional Court, Adli Mansour, was sworn in as interim president pending the holding of early elections.

At the same time, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Saad al-Katatni, and the deputy to the Brotherhood's spiritual guide, Mohamed Rashad Bayoumi, were jailed in Torah Prison.

In another report, Aswat Masriya said a court had also ordered the arrest of spiritual guide, Mohamed Badie, businessman Khairat al-Shater and five others on charges of inciting the killing of opponents of deposed president Mohamed Morsi.

In Washington, President Barack Obama has announced that he has ordered a review of American aid to Egypt, and called on the Egyptian armed forces “to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically-elected civilian government as soon as possible...”

Morsi was Egypt's first democratically-elected president.

In Addis Ababa, the African Union chairperson, Nkosazana Clarice Dlamini-Zuma, noted in a statement issued before Morsi's overthrow that the AU was in principle opposed to “unconstitutional changes of government.”

She called for “all Egyptian stakeholders to work towards a resolution of the current crisis through dialogue, in order to find an appropriate response to the popular aspirations within the framework of legality and Egyptian institutions.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reports military, political and diplomatic sources as saying opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was being tipped to lead a transitional government.