French media is reporting that Egypt’s top court has ordered a retrial of former Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie who had been earlier sentenced to death in connection with a mass outbreak from a Cairo prison following the deposition of then President Mohamed Morsi. According to the AFP report:
AFP, Cairo Thursday, 3 December 2015 Egypt’s top court on Thursday ordered a retrial of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie, overturning a death sentence for Islamist protest violence, a judicial official and a lawyer said.
Thirty-six co-defendants who were condemned to death or life in prison by a lower court will be retried along with Badie, who has also been sentenced to death in a different case.
They had been found guilty of plotting unrest from an ‘operations room’ in a Cairo protest camp in the months after the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
The convictions were appealed before the Court of Cassation, which on Thursday overturned them and ordered a retrial.
‘The ruling concerns all 37 defendants who are behind bars. Twelve of them including Badie had been sentenced to death’ by the lower court, defence lawyer Abdel Moneim Abdel Maqsud told AFP.
Badie’s co-defendants include U.S.-Egyptian citizen Mohamed Soltan, who had been sentenced to life in prison.
Soltan was deported in May under a presidential decree stipulating that foreigners convicted in Egypt can be sent back to their home countries.
Read the rest here.
It should be noted that Mohahed Soltan is the son of the notorious anti-Semitic cleric Salah Soltan (aka Sultan).
The GMBDW reported in June that an Egyptian court had sentenced more than 90 Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members to death in connection with the 2011 mass jailbreak at the center of previous court rulings. According to that report, this sentence included the deposed President Mohamed Morsi, Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, and Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi sentenced in absentia. It is not clear if the retrial will also include Morsi and Qaradawi.
We have long been reporting on the various sentences and death penalties issued by Egyptian courts against Muslim Brotherhood leaders The June ruling appears to have been a confirmation of the sentences that we reported in May, now seemingly overturned.
For a profile on Mohamed Badie, go here.