Reviving a judicial practice that has come under strong international criticism, an Egyptian criminal court on Monday reaffirmed a mass death sentence handed down to 183 people accused in a deadly attack on a police post.
Mass tribunals and sentencings have become a periodic feature of Egyptian court proceedings in the 19 months since the popularly supported coup led by Egypt's current president, Abdel Fattah Sisi, against Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist who had been the country's first democratically elected leader.
In the latest case, the court upheld the death penalty against nearly all defendants who had been previously convicted of killing as many as 11 police officers during an August 2013 rampage in Kerdasa, a town outside Cairo, in the shadow of the Pyramids, that has been a stronghold of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.
The attack came amid a wave of unrest that broke out in the wake of security forces' violent breakup of a sit-in by Morsi followers at Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawiya Square and other locales. More than 800 people died in the dispersals, according to human rights groups.
The attack on the police station in Kerdasa, in which the corpses of slain police officers were reported to have been mutilated, was one of the deadliest episodes in response to the killings at Rabaa.
But lawyers said many of the defendants rounded up after the police station attack were not even present at the scene, and that some of those arrested were Coptic Christians, not Islamist followers of Morsi. Other defendants included boys and elderly men, they said.
In the initial trial, provisional death sentences were handed down in December to 188 defendants. In the latest ruling, that total was reduced to 183 because two of the defendants had died, two others were acquitted, and one, a minor, received a 10-year jail sentence, according to a report by the state-run Al-Ahram newspaper. Thirty-seven of the defendants were tried in absentia, it said.
Last year brought other high-profile cases involving mass sentencings, which were widely condemned by Western governments and human rights groups. In March and April, a judge in Minya, south of Cairo, imposed a total of more than 1,200 death sentences, 220 of which were ordered upheld.
Defense lawyers said the mass tribunals made it impossible for the accused to receive a fair hearing, with individuals given no opportunity to hear evidence against them or offer any defense.
The judge in the latest case, Nagy Shehata, has been involved in several other closely watched courtroom dramas, including last year's sentencing of three journalists for the news channel Al Jazeera English to between seven and 10 years in prison. A retrial was ordered, and one of the three journalists, Australian correspondent Peter Greste, was freed and deported on Sunday.
Most arrests and killings of protesters have involved Morsi supporters, although secular critics of the government have been caught up as well. Human Rights Watch estimated that about three-quarters of the approximately 40,000 people arrested since the coup were suspected Islamists.
The Muslim Brotherhood, formerly Egypt's largest opposition movement, has been declared a terrorist organization, and Sisi claims the group is responsible for nearly all attacks against state and security targets that have taken place since Morsi's ouster.
Sisi blamed the Brotherhood for a series of attacks last week in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula that killed 31 people, most of them members of the security forces, even though another group that describes itself as the Egyptian franchise of Islamic State claimed responsibility.
The crackdown on Islamists, more sweeping than any carried out by previous governments, shows no sign of abating. On Monday, a former lawmaker, Mamdouh Ismail, was sentenced in absentia to life in prison on charges of taking part in violence following Morsi's ouster. And on Sunday, an Egyptian policeman was arrested, accused of having shot and killed an Islamist suspect who was hospitalized at the time.
Twitter: @laurakingLAT
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