A judge in southern Egypt has sentenced 528 supporters of the ousted
Islamist President Mohammed Morsi to death on charges of
murdering a policeman and attacking police.
The verdicts, which are subject to appeal and are likely to be
overturned, were delivered after only two sessions in one of the
largest mass trials in the country in decades.
The defendants were arrested in August of last year during unrest in
the town of Matay in Minya province. They were charged with
murder, attempted murder and stealing government weapons in
connection with an attack on a police station.
One police officer was killed in the attack. The violence was part of
rioting around the country sparked when security forces stormed two
pro-Morsi sit-ins in Cairo, killing hundreds of people on Aug. 14.
The group is among over 1,200 supporters of Mr Morsi on trial,
including senior Brotherhood members.
All but around 150 of the defendants in the case were tried in
absentia by the court in the city of Minya, south of Cairo.
The judge acquitted 16 of the 545 defendants on the grounds that
they had not been allowed to present a proper defence before the
judgment was made.
During the first session on Saturday, defense lawyer Khaled el-Koumi
said that he and other lawyers asked the presiding judge, Said
Youssef, to postpone the case to give them time to review the
hundreds of documents in the case, but the request was declined.
When another lawyer made a request, the judge interrupted and
refused to recognize it. When the lawyers protested, Youssef shouted
that they would not dictate what he should do and ordered court
security to step in between him and the lawyers.
A security official in the courtroom said the defendants and the
lawyers disrupted the proceedings by chanting against the judge:
"God is our only refuge!" He spoke on condition of anonymity
because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
"We didn't have the chance to say a word, to look at more than
3,000 pages of investigation and to see what evidence they are
talking about," el-Koumi, who was representing 10 of the defendants,
told The Associated Press.
A senior Brotherhood figure, Ibrahim Moneir, denounced the
verdicts, warning that abuses of justice will fuel a backlash against
the military-backed government that replaced Morsi.
"Now the coup is hanging itself by these void measures," he said,
speaking to the Qatari-based Al-Jazeera Mubashir Misr TV station.
He said he believed the verdicts were timed to send a message to an
Arab League summit that begins Tuesday in Kuwait, where Egypt is
pressing other Arab governments to ban the Muslim Brotherhood as
a terrorist group.
On Tuesday, another mass trial against Morsi's supporters opens in a
Minya court with 683 suspects facing similar charges. The
defendants in that case include Brotherhood leader Mohammed
Badie, who also faces multiple other trials, and senior members of
the group from Minya province.
Egypt's military toppled Morsi in July after four days of massive
demonstrations by his opponents demanding he step down for
abusing power during his year in office. Since then, Morsi's
Brotherhood and other Islamist supporters have staged near-daily
demonstrations that usually descend into violent street
confrontations with security forces.
The military-backed government has arrested some 16,000 people in
the ensuing crackdown, including most of the Brotherhood
leadership.
At the same time, militant bombings, suicide attacks and other
assaults — mostly by an al-Qaida-inspired group — have increased,
targeting police and military forces in retaliation for the crackdown.
The authorities have blamed the Brotherhood for the violence,
branding it a terrorist organization and confiscating its assets. The
group has denied any links to the attacks and has denounced the
violence.
Imad El-Anis, an expert in Middle Eastern politics at Nottingham
Trent University, said Monday's verdicts were "far from meeting
minimum international standards for judicial processes of this kind."
But he said Egyptian authorities are unlikely to heed any
international criticism of the verdicts "and are likely to push on with
further rapid mass trials."
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