News / Egypt

Egypt hands jail terms to 172 Brotherhood supporters, members

Sunday, 20 December 2015 2:03 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 20 December 2015 2:06 PM ]

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

A military court in Egypt has sentenced over 170 Brotherhood members and supporters to jail over their alleged role in violence, PressTV reports.

The military court in Asyut Province on Saturday gave 172 members and supporters of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood jail terms ranging from seven years to life in jail.

The defendants have been accused of a variety of charges, including murder, inciting violence and sabotage during violence in the central Minya Governorate in the summer of 2013.

Protests erupted in Minya following the Rabaa massacre in August 2013, during which Egyptian security forces raided two camps of protesters in the capital, Cairo. The camps had been set up by the supporters of democratically-elected former President Mohammad Morsi.

Morsi, affiliated with the Brotherhood, had been ousted by the Egyptian military in a coup days earlier.

The Muslim Brotherhood and National Coalition for Supporting Legitimacy (NCSL) claimed the death toll from the raid on the Rabaa camp was about 2,600 people.

This photo shows some senior figures of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood organization gesturing from the defendants’ cage during their trial in Cairo, June 2, 2015. (Photo by AFP)

In a separate case last week, the same military court in Asyut had charged 219 other Brotherhood supporters to jail terms ranging from 10-year sentences to 25 years in prison over similar charges. Reports from Egypt say about a tenth of those sentences in the Saturday court session were tried in absentia.

In August 2013, Egyptian security forces also carried out a deadly attack on another camp of protesters, at al-Nahda Square in the capital.

Human Rights Watch described the raid, together with the one in Rabaa, as “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”

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

Hundreds of the ex-president’s supporters, and Morsi himself, have been sentenced to death.

Nearly 300 of the political detainees have died in detention facilities. Human rights activists say “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.

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