Ex-Egyptian president gets death sentence
Amnesty International calls trials ‘charade’
CAIRO – An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced deposed President Mohammed Morsi and more than 100 others to death for orchestrating a prison escape during the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
The convicts include senior leaders of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood.
The Cairo Criminal Court said the preliminary sentences would be referred to the country’s chief Islamic legal authority, the Grand Mufti, for a nonbinding opinion as required by Egyptian law.
The court set June 2 for delivering a final ruling.
It also sentenced to death 16 people for conspiring with the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah to carry out the mass jailbreak.
Morsi’s name was not mentioned among those convicted, although the former president was originally indicted in the case.
The charges in both cases are related to the escape of thousands of prisoners, including political detainees, from jails across Egypt in the chaos after the 2011 uprising that eventually forced Mubarak to step down.
Morsi was arrested soon after the start of the anti-Mubarak revolt in January 2011.
Amnesty International said of the sentence: “Condemning Mohammed Morsi to death after more grossly unfair trials shows a complete disregard for human rights.”
The rights group’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, Said Boumedouha, said: “His trials were undermined even before he set foot in the courtroom. The fact that he was held for months incommunicado without judicial oversight and that he didn’t have a lawyer to represent him during the investigations makes these trials nothing but a charade.”
Morsi was detained at an undisclosed location immediately after his removal by the military in 2013.
Last month, Morsi was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of inciting violence against protesters when he was in power.
He is being tried in another case related to the alleged leaking of national security documents to Qatar, a Muslim Brotherhood ally.
Morsi also faces a separate trial on charges of defaming the judiciary.
The former president leader has refused to recognize the authority of the courts, insisting that he is the rightful president of Egypt.
Since Morsi’s overthrow, thousands of his followers have been detained, with many given severe sentences in mass trials.
The Egyptian authorities have also designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization after blaming it for a spate of deadly attacks. The Islamist group has repeatedly denied the charge.