Fourteen men, including Muslim Brotherhood leaders, were sentenced to death on Saturday, for setting up an "operation room" at the protest camp that supported ousted president Mohamed Morsi in Cairo's Rabaa Al-Adawiya area in the summer of 2013, among other charges.
Brotherhood supreme guide Mohamed Badie, the son of leading member and businessman Hassan Malek, Omar, as well as leading member Saad El-Hoseiny are among those who received the capital punishment.
Former Brotherhood spokesperson Mahmoud Ghozlan and leading member Saad Emara were sentenced to death in absentia.
Meanwhile, in the same case, 37 other defendants were sentenced to life in prison, including hunger striker Mohamed Soltan and Saad El-Shater, son of Brotherhood strongman and business tycoon Khairat El-Shater.
Soltan, an Egyptian-American, has been on a hunger strike since 26 January 2014. According to his family, his health condition has alarmingly deteriorated ever since, and he has repeatedly lost consciousness.
The defendants can lodge an appeal against the verdict.
After Morsi's ouster in July 2013, the now-banned Brotherhood, from which Morsi hails, and other supporting Islamist groups held a sit-in to protest his deposal in Cairo's Rabaa Al-Adawiya. Security personnel forcibly dispersed the massive protest camp in August 2013, leaving hundreds dead.
Since Morsi's ouster, courts have issued mass death sentences in a number of cases against Morsi loyalists.
Brotherhood supreme guide Badie was sentenced to death in two other cases, with one overturned by an appeals court and the second rejected by the Grand Mufti, who has to approve all death sentences in Egypt.
Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/127391/Egypt/Politics-/-Mor...
