A judge in Egypt has sentenced to death 720 men, including the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, in a pair of mass trials that were both completed after two brief court sessions.
In the first case, 683 men – including the Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Badie – were sentenced to death on charges of killing a policeman in a southern Egyptian town last August.
Minutes later, in a second and separate case, the same judge, Saeed Youssef, upheld the death sentences of 37 of the 529 men he notoriously sentenced to hang last month . The remaining 492 had their sentences commuted to 25-year jail terms, with all 529 convicted of killing a second police officer in a neighbouring town on the same day.
In a separate development on Monday , a Cairo court banned the 6 April youth movement, the liberal protest group charged with playing a leading role in Egypt’s 2011 revolution. A spokesman for the group, Ahmad Abd Allah, said the move highlighted the extent of Egypt’s counter-revolution.
“It shows that it’s not just the Islamists who are being targeted, it’s also liberal groups like us. And [the government] will continue all the way to close down all democratic forces,” Abd Allah said. “What else did you think a military coup would do? It’s something expected from a military regime that has killed thousands of people, and imprisoned thousands more. And it’s just the beginning.”
Lawyers and rights campaigners said the sentences in both court cases resulted from rushed proceedings that infringed basic local and international law.
Mohamed Elmessiry, an Amnesty International researcher who attended the hearings, said: “In each trial, the defence were not able to present their case, the witnesses were not heard, and many of the accused were not brought to the courtroom. This lacks any basic guarantees of a fair trial – not only under international law, but also Egyptian national law.
“The trials themselves are a death sentence to any remaining credibility and independence of Egypt’s criminal justice system.”
Amnesty has previously said the 529 case was the largest batch of simultaneous death sentences in the world in living memory – a record now beaten by Monday’s developments.
Both cases form the latest instalment of a government crackdown in which at least 16,000 people have been arrested and more than 2,500 killed since the removal of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi from the presidency last July.
Prosecutors said the defendants in both cases were Brotherhood members who collectively killed two police officers during an explosion of nationwide violence last August. The 529 defendants were accused of lynching a policeman in Matay, a town in Minya province, southern Egypt. On the same day, the 683 others – including Mr Badie – were said to have killed an officer in the nearby town of Adwa.
But many of the defendants in both trials have said they were not present during the attacks, and some said they were not even supporters of the Brotherhood. In some cases, they said they were not even in Minya province and that they were reported to the police by informants acting on personal agendas.
“There is nothing against me – no one has any evidence that I was there on that day,” said Hagag Saber, a 34-year-old government electrician who is one of the 683 who were sentenced to death for killing the policeman in Adwa. Currently at large, he claims he was in Cairo the day the attacks happened.
Mr Saber added: “There is no justice or integrity, nothing based on facts. Everything is based on an illegitimate investigation that took hearsay from people in the street.”
Saber’s lawyer, Mohamed Abd-El Fatah Ali, showing the roughly 6,000 pages of court documents from the case, argued that the judge could not have had time to read them.
“There’s no human who could read this amount of newspaper pages, let alone legal documents containing testimonies, in order to find the paragraph that relates to this case and these defendants in the time allowed,” said Mr Ali, who was also fined by the judge and referred to court himself for boycotting an earlier session. “That would take three months.”
Families alleged that some defendants were not even mentioned in the documents. One of Mr Ali’s colleagues, lawyer Ahmed Eid, was arrested because of personal differences with local policemen, his family claimed. Previously a lawyer in the 529 case, Mr Eid joined his clients in jail after the case had officially been referred to court. His wife said police arrested Mr Eid because he had failed to pay them a bribe, and that investigators – with whom he was in daily contact on behalf of his clients – had never previously suggested he was involved in the case.
Mr Eid – a supporter of former dictator Hosni Mubarak – is one of several men who have said they are not affiliated with the Brotherhood, but are among those sentenced.
Cleric Ahmed Korany is another, despite his family having provided written testimony to the court from witnesses who said he was not involved in the crimes.
Mr Korany’s lawyer Ahmed Shabib said: “It’s very well known that he was against the Brotherhood, so I was so surprised to see him among the defendants.”
In issuing the sentences, Judge Youssef ignored an international campaign in which more than 1.5 million people signed a petition hosted by the online activists Avaaz, calling for a re-trial.
In Egypt, the outcry has not been universal. Many see the 529 case as a fitting revenge on the Brotherhood, who are blamed for a wave of militancy across Egypt in recent months.
“The outrage over the conviction of 529 terrorists is in itself an outrage,” summarised one commentator in a state-run newspaper this month.
After the 529’s initial sentences in March, Egypt’s foreign ministry released a statement defending the court’s integrity. “The sentence was issued by an independent court after careful study of the case,” it said.
The 683 death sentences will now be referred to Egypt’s Grand Mufti, a senior Muslim cleric, for his opinion. The 529 will be referred to an appeal court, as the mufti has already been consulted on their sentences.
In an odd aside, the judge recommended that the prosecution seek the reinstatement of the death penalty for the 492 whose sentences were commuted.
Judicial experts said the case was unlikely to have been expressly ordered by a central figure such as Egypt’s influential army chief, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.
Nathan Brown, a professor at George Washington University, and an expert on the Egyptian judiciary, said last month: "I think it is more a matter of a common mentality than direct co-ordination. Indeed, the court here has gone so far that it is difficult to see that it serves the interest of the regime." – ( Guardian service)