Eight Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including their supreme leader, sentenced to death in Egypt

Published on: 04/03/2024 – 23:53

2 minutes

A special court in Cairo on Monday sentenced eight Muslim Brotherhood leaders to death for violence in 2013, including the supreme leader of the banned Brotherhood in Egypt, following the ouster of Islamist Mohamed Morsi by current President Abdel Fattah. Al-Sisi.

The Emergency Supreme Court of State Security sentenced guide Mohamed Badi, now 80, to death, as well as several other figures in the movement of Mohamed Morsi, the short-lived democratically elected president and now deceased, Mahmoud Ezzat, Mohamed al-Beltghi and Safwat Hegazi. All of these men have been sentenced to death, sometimes to death, in other cases in recent years.

State daily Al-Ahram reported that a court on Monday sentenced 37 other defendants to life imprisonment and 13 others to 10 to 15 years in prison in the so-called “Al-Nasr Road Violence” case.

In 2022, Egypt was the fourth country in the world with the highest number of executions according to Amnesty International. That same year, its judges handed down 538 death sentences, the most known in the world.

severe repression

Since taking power, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has led a fierce crackdown on the opposition, particularly focusing on the Muslim Brotherhood, which has imprisoned thousands of its supporters.

Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood, which is now banned in the country but which has spread well beyond its borders, has long been the main opposition movement in Egypt, despite massive repression, until it won the first free elections in the wake of the Arabs. Spring of 2011.

On August 13, 2013, a month after the ouster of Mohamed Morsi, hundreds of his supporters were killed in Cairo when they broke up their sit-in, which police accused of being armed.

Since then, thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood have been sentenced to sentences ranging from a few years in prison to death, others have gone into exile, and many of its leaders, including Mohammed Morsi, have died in custody.

with AFP