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Egypt sentences 528 supporters of the ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi to death Egypt sentences 528 supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi to death - ‘Sentences handed out like small change’
(about 9 hours later)
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. An Egyptian court has sentenced 528 alleged supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood to death, in the largest mass death sentence handed down in recent history, anywhere in the world.
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.  The sentence is the latest blow in a crackdown which has sent the Brotherhood reeling since the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi – a prominent member of the organisation – in July last year.
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. Defence lawyers at the court in Minya, south of the capital, Cairo, claimed they were neither given time to review the evidence against their clients, nor cross-examine witnesses for the prosecution.
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. One of those sentenced to death, accused of a violent attack on a police station which left one officer dead, was Assem Mohamed Ahmed, a 34-year-old man paralysed on one side of his body, according to his brother Ahmed Mohammed, a mechanic.
The group is among over 1,200 supporters of Mr Morsi on trial, including senior Brotherhood members. Assem is one of more than 400 of the defendants who are not currently in detention. Another is Sayyef Gamal, 20, a medical student at Minya University, who said that he could not have participated in the attack on the police station in Minya, Upper Egypt, because at the time it occurred, in mid-August last year, he was fleeing police attacking a sit-in in Cairo, several hundred miles away.
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. That sit-in, calling for the return of Morsi, was cleared on 14 August, leading to the deaths of more than 900 people. The violence of the clearing sparked attacks on both police and Christians in Minya and elsewhere, including the attack which Sayyef is now accused of participating in.
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. Sayyef now moves discreetly between safe houses, watching the news, and hoping for a reversal of the verdict at a retrial.
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.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. “Now the coup is hanging itself by these void measures,” he said, speaking to the Qatari-based Al Jazeera television channel.
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. The sentence was being viewed as exceptionally harsh, even in Egypt’s polarised climate. But some lawyers support the judge’s decision.
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. “It’s good that terrorists be sentenced to death,” said Gamil Dorgham, a Cairo-based lawyer.
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 Muslim Brotherhood was designated a terrorist organisation in December, although the government has produced no evidence to support its designation.
The military-backed government has arrested some 16,000 people in the ensuing crackdown, including most of the Brotherhood leadership. “This decision is not a final one, but if it were final, it’s all right. You have to know we are fighting terrorism. We have to deter them,” Mr Dorgham said.
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. Nathan Brown, a professor at the George Washington University in Washington, and an expert on Egypt’s judiciary system, says the verdict is likely to be lessened.
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." “If it were implemented in its current form, that would shock me even more than the verdict itself,” he said.
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." Despite the outlandish harshness and volume of the verdicts, several features of the case have become typical of the widening crackdown on Morsi’s Brotherhood and the secular opposition.
Additional reporting by AP  At least 16,000 people have been arrested since July, according to state  officials, and thousands  have been tortured, according  to the monitoring group Nation  Without Torture.
The accused and their lawyers also routinely complained of judicial abuses, according to Heba Wanis, of another monitoring group, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.Amnesty International said that it was the largest simultaneous mass death sentence handed down in memory, anywhere in the world.
“There is no case that we are aware of that is of this magnitude,” said Jan Wetzel, a death penalty researcher at Amnesty.
“It’s grotesque, using death sentences like small change.”
Maha Sayyed, 30, a teacher, said she believes her husband Ahmed Eid, a lawyer, was detained in an act of revenge after he secured the release of four of his clients accused of participating in Brotherhood-related activities.
“We want to talk about that case with those four guys,” one security officer said to him, according to his wife, before arranging the meeting that led to his arrest.
Now he is one of the more than 100 people who are in custody, accused over the police station attack.
The 528 sentenced on Monday were among more than 1,200 Muslim Brotherhood supporters accused of participating in the violence in Minya. Many of the remainder are due in court today, including Mohamed Badie, the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood – its most senior figure.
Egypt’s judiciary repeatedly clashed with Mohamed Morsi during his year in power, and was one of the pillars of the alliance which deposed him on 3 July, replacing him with the then head of the Supreme Constitutional Court.
The Brotherhood has accused judges of aiding the crackdown through harsh and politicised verdicts.
“We have become used to decisions like this from the courts,” said Ahmed Shaheeb, a lawyer for 25 of the defendants.
Mr Shaheeb’s own brother Hossam fled the country after being accused in the  same case.
Professor Brown believes, however that most verdicts are arrived at without interference from the state, but that deep problems nonetheless skew the system.
“First, the security apparatus seems unscrupulous and that is where evidence comes from,” he said.
“Second, large parts of the judiciary seem to have been spooked by the Morsi regime, sometimes for good reason and sometimes not. That seems to have clouded the judgement of many.
“And third, the judiciary has a world view that is very respectful of law but also one that can be less than liberal, especially when the law is less than liberal or there is a perceived threat to judges’ own self-image as pillars of order and justice.”