Alwaght-An Egyptian appellate court has quashed the death penalty handed down to 36 Muslim Brotherhood members, including its spiritual leader, and ordered a retrial.
On Wednesday, Egypt’s Court of Cassation overturned death sentences handed to Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie and 35 others, the website of the Egyptian daily newspaper al-Ahram reported. No date has been set for a fresh trial.
The defendants were indicted for raiding a police station in the Egyptian city of Minya, killing a police officer and eight others. The Minya court of first instance had initially sentenced several hundred supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi to death.
The Cassation Court accepted the appeals filed by only 36 of 136 defendants against their June sentence in the case known locally as ‘Adwa incidents’, named according to a village in Minya governorate where clashes erupted after the ouster of former president, Mohamed Morsi, in August 2013.
In 2014, four Brotherhood members got life term and one was sentenced to 15 years in jail while 14 others got seven years in prison.
Egypt’s 2011 revolution led to the overthrow of the dictator, Hosni Mubarak. In an election after Mubarak’s ouster, Muslim Brotherhood-backed Morsi was elected president.
Morsi was later ousted in a military coup led by former military chief and current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in July 2013.
The Egyptian government has been cracking down on any opposition since Morsi was ousted. Sisi has been accused of leading the suppression of Morsi supporters, as hundreds of them have been killed in clashes with Egyptian security forces over the past year.
Rights groups say the army’s crackdown on the supporters of Morsi has led to the deaths of over 1,400 people and the arrest of 22,000 others, including some 200 people who have been sentenced to death in mass trials.
