clear

Creating new perspectives since 2009

Egyptian court sentences Muslim Brotherhood leader to life in prison

September 24, 2018 at 2:27 pm

An Egyptian court yesterday sentenced the Supreme Guide of the banned Muslim Brotherhood group Mohamed Badie and others to life in prison over charges of incitement of murder and violence in the Upper Egyptian province of Minya following the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in which took place in the summer of 2013.

According to the state owned newspaper Ahram Online, the court sentenced 64 others alongside Badie to life. Another 81 defendants were sentenced to between 10-15 years in prison and dozens of others were handed shorter jail terms. The court acquitted 288 other defendants in the same case.

A judicial source said in a press statement that the Criminal Court of Minya held yesterday at the Institute of Police Secretaries in Turah (south of Cairo) sentenced Badie and others to life in jail in the case known in the media as Al-Adwah.

Read: Was Ashraf Marwan an Israeli angel or an Egyptian prodigy?

On 21 June 2014 the Minya Criminal Court sentenced Badie and others to death in absentia in the Al-Adwa case. But on 11 February, 2015, the Court of Cassation (supreme court of appeals) decided to accept the appeal filed against the previous judgment, and ordered a retrial with another court which decided its new ruling on Sunday.

The first verdict was handed down against Badie and others over storming a police station in the Upper Egypt province of Minya in 2013 and killing a policeman in protest of the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in by the army and police forces.

#SisiEra

On 14 August 2013 forces of the army and police forcibly broke up the sit-in by the supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, the first elected Egyptian president, in Rabaa square, east of Cairo and Nahda square in the west, which resulted in protests across the country.

According to the National Council for Human Rights in Egypt, 632 victims were killed, including eight policemen, while local and international human rights organisations said that the number of victims exceeded 1,000. Ahram Online said that the dispersal left hundreds of Brotherhood members and dozens of police dead.