Egypt military court sentences 220 Brotherhood members

An Egyptian military court has sentenced nearly 220 Muslim Brotherhood members to hefty jail terms over their alleged roles in a series of anti-government protests in 2013, Press TV reports.

The military court in the province of Assiut on Saturday handed down the sentences to the group, which included prominent Brotherhood leaders and figures.

A presiding judge sentenced at least 196 members of Brotherhood, who were tried in absentia, to 25 years or life in jail each.

In addition to that, the court also sentenced 22 of the convicts to ten years in prison each.

The court also fined each of the activists 20,000 Egyptian pounds (about USD 2,570).

According to Egyptian judicial sources, the accused were found guilty of inciting violence during street protests in the central province of Minya in 2013. The incident in August of that year came days after the army ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president.

On August 14, 2013, Egyptian security forces carried out deadly attacks on two camps of protesters in the capital, Cairo: one at al-Nahda Square and a larger one at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square.

The two sites had been occupied by supporters of the ousted president, 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.

Since the ouster of Morsi, thousands of anti-government protesters, mostly Brotherhood supporters, have been sentenced to jail by civilian and military courts.

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