Egyptian authorities announce execution of Hisham Al-Ashmawy

Today, Wednesday, the Egyptian army executed Hisham Al-Ashmawy, who was convicted of carrying out several terrorist attacks in the country.

The army spokesman, Colonel Tamer Al-Rifai, said on his Facebook page: “This morning, the death sentence was carried out against the terrorist Hisham Al-Ashmawy.”

Last Monday, the Cairo Criminal Court sentenced Ashmawy, a former officer in the Egyptian army, and 36 others to death, in a case known to the media as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis.

The Egyptian authorities accused Al-Ashmawy and others of being members of the “Al-Murabitun” organisation affiliated with Al-Qaeda of attacking a security checkpoint in the Farafra area in western Egypt in July 2014, killing 28 soldiers, including two officers.

The Egyptian judiciary also accused Al-Ashmawy of bombing the Italian consulate in Cairo and the headquarters of the National Security Agency (Internal Intelligence Service) in Shubra region, north of Cairo, and of attempting to assassinate the public prosecutor.

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Al-Ashmawy was charged with other crimes, including establishing and assuming the leadership of a terrorist group, having ties with organisations such as the Palestinian Hamas movement, sabotaging state facilities, and attempting premeditated murder.

Al-Ashmawy appeared in a video in 2017, calling himself “Abu Omar Al-Muhajir”, in which he declared his responsibility for the Farafra operation, announced his new organisational position as the prince of “Al-Murabitun”, a group he formed after defecting from Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis organisation in 2015, which announced loyalty to Daesh.

On 29 May 2019, Cairo announced that Al-Ashmawy had been handed over by the militia of Khalifa Hifter, who had arrested him in the city of Derna, in eastern Libya, in October 2018, according to the official Egyptian news agency.