Cairo: Egypt’s highest court of appeals last Sunday upheld the life imprisonment of the group’s leader and 10 other members of Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, reports MENA news agency. A Cairo criminal court found all 10, as well as the group’s Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, guilty of charges related to killing police officers and organizing mass jailbreaks during Egypt’s 2011 revolution. The revolt culminated in the ouster of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Approximately 20,000 prisoners were helped to escape and the defendants were found guilty of undermining national security by conspiring with foreign militant groups—the Palestinian, Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Meanwhile, the Court of Cassation acquitted eight middle-rank leaders of the nation’s oldest Islamist organization, who had been sentenced to 15 years in prison. The court’s decision on the appeal is final. Muslim Brotherhood leaders have been sentenced to life in prison several times since 2013, when the military ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi. Morsi had come from the group’s ranks, but his one-year reign proved divisive and sparked nationwide protests.
Since 2013, tens of thousands of Egyptians have been arrested, and many have fled the country. As a defendant in the prison-break case, Morsi died after collapsing in a courtroom while appearing in a separate trial in summer 2019. Morsi escaped with other Brotherhood leaders in 2011 after being detained amid a crackdown by Mubarak’s security forces to undercut the planned protests.
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The Court of Cassation upheld the death sentence for 12 people involved in a 2013 protest by Islamists, including several senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders. As president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi was leading the military in 2013 when it removed Morsi amid protests against his rule. He was re-elected in 2018 after being elected in 2014. Trials and death sentences have consistently drawn scathing criticism from rights groups in the United States and abroad that call the process a mockery of justice.
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