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Egypt sentences 529 members of Muslim Brotherhood to death Egypt sentences 528 supporters of the ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi to death
(about 2 hours later)
An Egyptian court sentenced 529 members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood to death on Monday on charges including murder, a defence lawyer said, in a sharp escalation of a crackdown on the movement. A judge in southern Egypt has sentenced 528 supporters of the ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi to death on charges of murdering a policeman and attacking police.
Most were arrested during clashes which erupted in the southern province of Minya after the forced dispersal of two Muslim Brotherhood protest camps in Cairo on August 14. The verdicts, which are subject to appeal and are likely to be overturned, were delivered after only two sessions in one of the largest mass trials in the country in decades. 
Political turmoil has deepened in Egypt since the army overthrew President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood last July. Security forces have killed hundreds of Brotherhood members in the street, and arrested thousands of others. The defendants were arrested in August of last year during unrest in the town of Matay in Minya province. They were charged with murder, attempted murder and stealing government weapons in connection with an attack on a police station.
“The court has decided to sentence to death 529 defendants, and 16 were acquitted,” lawyer Ahmed al-Sharif told Reuters. The ruling can be appealed. One police officer was killed in the attack. The violence was part of rioting around the country sparked when security forces stormed two pro-Morsi sit-ins in Cairo, killing hundreds of people on Aug. 14.
The charges against the group, on trial in Minya since Saturday, include violence, inciting murder, storming a police station, attacking persons and damaging public and private property. The group is among over 1,200 supporters of Mr Morsi on trial, including senior Brotherhood members.
Only 123 of the defendants were present. The rest were either released, out on bail or on the run. All but around 150 of the defendants in the case were tried in absentia by the court in the city of Minya, south of Cairo.
The government has declared the Brotherhood a “terrorist” group. The Brotherhood says it is a peaceful movement. The judge acquitted 16 of the 545 defendants on the grounds that they had not been allowed to present a proper defence before the judgment was made.
Reuters During the first session on Saturday, defense lawyer Khaled el-Koumi said that he and other lawyers asked the presiding judge, Said Youssef, to postpone the case to give them time to review the hundreds of documents in the case, but the request was declined.
When another lawyer made a request, the judge interrupted and refused to recognize it. When the lawyers protested, Youssef shouted that they would not dictate what he should do and ordered court security to step in between him and the lawyers.
A security official in the courtroom said the defendants and the lawyers disrupted the proceedings by chanting against the judge: "God is our only refuge!" He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
"We didn't have the chance to say a word, to look at more than 3,000 pages of investigation and to see what evidence they are talking about," el-Koumi, who was representing 10 of the defendants, told The Associated Press.
A senior Brotherhood figure, Ibrahim Moneir, denounced the verdicts, warning that abuses of justice will fuel a backlash against the military-backed government that replaced Morsi.
"Now the coup is hanging itself by these void measures," he said, speaking to the Qatari-based Al-Jazeera Mubashir Misr TV station.
He said he believed the verdicts were timed to send a message to an Arab League summit that begins Tuesday in Kuwait, where Egypt is pressing other Arab governments to ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.
On Tuesday, another mass trial against Morsi's supporters opens in a Minya court with 683 suspects facing similar charges. The defendants in that case include Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie, who also faces multiple other trials, and senior members of the group from Minya province.
Egypt's military toppled Morsi in July after four days of massive demonstrations by his opponents demanding he step down for abusing power during his year in office. Since then, Morsi's Brotherhood and other Islamist supporters have staged near-daily demonstrations that usually descend into violent street confrontations with security forces.
The military-backed government has arrested some 16,000 people in the ensuing crackdown, including most of the Brotherhood leadership.
At the same time, militant bombings, suicide attacks and other assaults — mostly by an al-Qaida-inspired group — have increased, targeting police and military forces in retaliation for the crackdown. The authorities have blamed the Brotherhood for the violence, branding it a terrorist organization and confiscating its assets. The group has denied any links to the attacks and has denounced the violence.
Imad El-Anis, an expert in Middle Eastern politics at Nottingham Trent University, said Monday's verdicts were "far from meeting minimum international standards for judicial processes of this kind."
But he said Egyptian authorities are unlikely to heed any international criticism of the verdicts "and are likely to push on with further rapid mass trials."
Additional reporting by AP