News / Egypt

Egypt court gives ten years to Brotherhood leader Badie

Tuesday, 22 December 2015 6:34 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 22 December 2015 6:34 PM ]

Mohamed Badie, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. (AFP Photo)

A military court in Egypt has sentenced the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie, to 10 years in jail over deadly protests following the 2013 ouster of Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically-elected president of the country.

Egyptian judicial officials said on Tuesday that Badie and dozens of others in the trial were found guilty of participating in clashes that left over 30 people dead in the canal city of Suez between August 14 and 16, 2013.

The charges included vandalism, inciting violence, murder, assaulting military personnel and setting fire to armored personnel carriers and two Coptic churches in Suez.

Fellow Brotherhood leader Mohamed Beltagy and Safwat Hegazy, another pro-Brotherhood figure, were also sentenced to 10 years in prison along with Badie.

On August 14, 2013, Egyptian security forces launched violent attacks on protest camps at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in the capital, Cairo, and Nahda Square in Giza, the third largest city in Egypt. The events in Suez happened afterward.

Human Rights Watch said over 815 people were killed at Rabaa Square, whereas the Egyptian Health Ministry put the death toll at 638. The rights organization said last year that the massacre was one of the world’s largest in a single day in recent history.

Ninety other defendants tried in absentia on Tuesday were sentenced to life terms, which in Egypt run to 25 years.

Forty-one defendants were sentenced to serve between three and seven years behind bars, while 90 others were handed down life sentences.

The sentences can be appealed.

The leader of Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie (C), gestures from the defendants cage as he and others attend their trial, along with ousted president Mohamed Morsi (unseen), at the police academy on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, June 2, 2015. (AFP photo)

Badie is facing several trials and has been sentenced to death in a separate case along with Morsi for plotting jailbreaks and attacks on police during the 2011 uprising that ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The Brotherhood leader has also been handed life sentences in five other cases.

Egypt’s military courts have been under fire by rights groups for their harsh and hasty verdicts.

Since the ouster of Morsi in the military coup of July 2013, Egyptian authorities have launched a harsh crackdown against his supporters leaving hundreds of Brotherhood supporters dead and thousands more jailed.

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