529 sentenced to death in Egypt

Verdict against Morsi backers for police death stuns experts

Supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi chant slogans during a demonstration inside Ain Shams University in Cairo Egypt, Monday, March 24, 2014. A court in Egypt on Monday sentenced to death 529 supporters of Morsi on charges of murdering a policeman and attacking police, convicting them after only two sessions in one of the largest mass trials in the country in decades. (AP Photo/Roger Anis, El Shorouk) EGYPT OUT
Supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi chant slogans during a demonstration inside Ain Shams University in Cairo Egypt, Monday, March 24, 2014. A court in Egypt on Monday sentenced to death 529 supporters of Morsi on charges of murdering a policeman and attacking police, convicting them after only two sessions in one of the largest mass trials in the country in decades. (AP Photo/Roger Anis, El Shorouk) EGYPT OUT

CAIRO - A criminal court in the Egyptian city of Minya sentenced 529 detainees to death Monday after a single session of their mass trial, convicting them of murder for the killing of a police officer in the rioting last summer after the July military ouster of former President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Legal experts called the case the largest mass trial or conviction in the history of modern Egypt. It also was a surprising acceleration of the 9-month-old crackdown on Morsi’s Islamist supporters and liberal dissenters.

“We have never heard of anything of this magnitude before, inside or outside of Egypt, that was within a judicial system - not just a mass execution,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights who specializes in criminal justice.

“It is quite ridiculous,” he said, arguing that it would be impossible to prove more than 500 people each played a meaningful role in the killing of a single police officer, especially after just one session of the trial. “Clearly this is an attempt to intimidate and terrorize the opposition, and specifically the Islamist opposition, but would the judge get so deeply involved in politics up to this point?”

Lawyers said the verdict was almost certain to be overturned on appeal. About 400 of those convicted are fugitives who were sentenced in absentia; under Egyptian law they will be entitled to a retrial if they are apprehended.

The verdict was the latest in a string of harsh and speedy sentences against purported Islamist supporters of the deposed president, including a 10-day trial that recently ended in sentences of 17 years each for a group of student protesters.

Minya is an Islamist stronghold south of Cairo along the Nile River, and news reports said a similar mass trial, including 600 defendants accused of violence against the new military-backed government, was set to begin there today.

Legal analysts suggested that the judges issuing the verdicts might be caught up in the fervor of animosity toward Morsi’s Islamist supporters that has swept other segments of society since his ouster and that they might also be acting on instructions from security officials, moving voluntarily to curry favor with the new authorities.

Egyptian state news media described the defendants as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that backed Morsi and dominated parliamentary elections two years ago.

After removing Morsi last summer, the military-led government killed more than 1,000 of his supporters in mass shootings at demonstrations against the takeover, and since then it has arrested many thousands of others.

In December, the government formally outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, declaring it a terrorist group and subjecting any of its members or supporters to heavy penalties.

The verdict issued Monday, however, concerned events that took place in August, about six weeks after the military takeover, when security forces used deadly force to disperse huge protest sit-ins.

The assault set off a backlash against the police around the country, and Minya, which was a center of a militant insurgency two decades ago, was the scene of some of the worst violence.

Angry Morsi supporters ransacked several churches, blaming Egypt’s Christian minority for backing the takeover, and assaulted at least one local police headquarters.

The 529 defendants sentenced Monday were convicted of attacking the police station, killing an officer and trying to kill two others during the rioting, the state newspaper Al Ahram reported.

The newspaper said the verdict came at the start of the second session of the trial and 16 defendants were acquitted.

The London office of the Muslim Brotherhood, acting on behalf of the outlawed Egyptian branch, said in a statement that the group would seek to appeal, calling the decision “a clear violation of all norms of humane and legal justice.”

The Egyptian government, evidently trying to pre-empt anger at the verdict, issued its own statement emphasizing that “the Egyptian judiciary is entirely independent and is not influenced in any way by the executive branch.”

It noted that “the sentence was issued by an independent court after careful study of the case” and that the decision is “only the first verdict in the trial process,” including appeals to higher courts.

Scholars said the verdict appeared to be without precedent in Egypt, in part because it was issued by a regular court rather than by a military tribunal or other special security panel.

Also Monday, another court in Cairo continued the trial of several journalists for the pan-Arab news channel Al-Jazeera who have been charged with broadcasting false reports of unrest in Egypt as part of an Islamist conspiracy to topple the new government. At least one of the Egyptian journalists has been imprisoned since August.

Information for this article was contributed by Asmaa Al Zohairy of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/25/2014

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