Egypt preparing 'extrajudicial execution' of political detainees, AOHR warns

Egypt is preparing to carry out “the extrajudicial execution” of seven prisoners of conscience under the orders of the “politicised judiciary”, the Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK) warned yesterday.

“The Court of Cassation rejected appeals submitted by the defendants and upheld the death sentences, thus making it final and enforceable at any moment,” AOHR said in a statement.

The court upheld the death sentences against Magdy Mohamed Ibrahim Ibrahim, Mahmoud Attia Ahmed Abdel Ghani, Abdel Wahab Mustafa Mohamed Mustafa, Musab Abdel Hamid Khalifa Abdel Baqi, Abdallah Nader Al-Sharqawi Al-Gameai, Abdelrahman Issa Abdel Khaleq and Mahmoud El-Sayyid Amin Hassan.

Their cases were initially heard in 2015 after they were charged with “making a terrorist plan while inside prisons with the aim of overthrowing the regime, and administering the group’s members outside to carry out operations against individuals, police officers and police facilities, as well as destroying public properties, especially electricity towers and transformers.”

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In June 2022, the First Circuit of Terrorism ruled against ten defendants in the case; three had been tried in absentia.

“The rulings, like many other rulings, were based on fabricated security investigations without any material evidence or logic, and confessions of defendants were extracted under torture,” AOHR said.

Political detainees in Egypt suffer from “the moment of their arrest. They are also subjected to enforced disappearance, deprive them of communication with the outside world, subjected to severe torture in order to confess to fabricated charges against them, and they are tried in unfair trials that issue harsh sentences against them, up to death sentences, which the authorities often carry out without a prior notification to their families,” the rights group added.

With this ruling, the number of people against whom final and enforceable death sentences were issued has risen to 211, 105 of whom have been executed, while 106 people are still awaiting execution.