Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood leaders given death penalty
May 16, 2015, 12:35 pm

Morsi was elected president in June 2012 and served for just over a year before being ousted [Xinhua]

The presiding judges found him guilty Saturday of a prison break in 2011 during the security vacuum that occurred during the January 2011 uprising.

Morsi is already serving a 20-year sentence for other charges related to violence targeting protesters.

The court’s sentencing – 106 other Muslim Brotherhood defendants (including senior cadres) were also handed the death penalty – will now be relegated to the Grand Mufti, the country’s highest Islamic authority.

A final verdict is expected by June 2, local authorities have said.

Meanwhile, Agence France-Presse reported that three judges in Sinai were killed by unknown assailants on Saturday. It is unclear whether the killings were in response to Morsi’s sentence.

On July 3, 2013, then Defence Minister Abdel-Fatah El-Sisi ordered the Egyptian military to remove President Mohamed Morsi from office following civil dissent which brought hundreds of thousands to the streets calling on the Islamist leader to step down.

Since then, and particularly after hundreds were killed when the army dismantled two pro-Morsi protest camps, the government has been locked in a war against terrorism as it tries to convince the electorate that its political road map to stabilize the country and revitalize the economy is the best way forward.

In June 2014, El-Sisi won by a landslide a presidential election. But extremist violence against the government has continued, particularly in the Sinai Peninsula.

Writing for The BRICS POST shortly after Morsi’s ouster, political expert Larbi Sadiki said that the trial itself did not bode well for democratic reconstruction.

“Moreover, like all measures taken to dismiss the fledgling democratisation under the behest of the ousted and now imprisoned president, the trial will widen the rift in an Egypt already deeply divided in the middle for and against Morsi, and for and against his military captors,” Sadiki said.

The BRICS POST with input from Agencies