Egypt court sentences 95 Brotherhood members to life in prison
An Egyptian court has sentenced 95 Muslim Brotherhood members to life in prison over their alleged role in anti-government protests in 2013, Press TV reports.
The court sentenced Brotherhood leaders Mohamed Badie, Mohamed al-Beltagy and Safwat Hegazy and other prominent Brotherhood figures on Saturday.
The verdict was announced at a police academy courthouse on the outskirts of the capital, Cairo.
At least 76 of the convicts were sentenced in absentia.
In addition to that, presiding judge Mohamed al-Saaeed also sentenced 28 members of Brotherhood to ten years in jail each.
Egyptian judicial sources say the accused were found guilty of inciting violence and storming a police station during street protests in the Suez Canal city of Port Said more than two years ago. The incident in August 2013 came days after the army ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president.
In 2013, the Egyptian army started a systematic crackdown on the supporters of Morsi. Since his overthrow on July 3 that year, thousands of anti-government protesters, mostly Brotherhood supporters, have been sentenced to jail by civilian and military courts.
Hundreds of the ex-president’s supporters, and Morsi himself, have been sentenced to death.
Nearly 300 of political detainees have died in detention facilities. Human rights activists say that “deliberate and systematic medical negligence” on the part of prison authorities, torture, overcrowded prisons, and overall “unhealthy and inhumane” conditions imposed on more than 40,000 political prisoners in the detention facilities are the main causes of the deaths.
Rabaa massacre
On August 14, 2013, Egyptian security forces carried out deadly attacks on two camps of protesters in Cairo, one at al-Nahda Square and a larger one at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square. The two sites had been occupied by supporters of Morsi for weeks.
Human Rights Watch described the raids as "one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history."
The Muslim Brotherhood and National Coalition for Supporting Legitimacy (NCSL) claimed the death toll of the Rabaa massacre alone was about 2,600 people.
However, not a single authority in the country has been summoned to courts over the massacre.
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