AN EGYPTIAN COURT has sentenced 66 people to life in prison, including Muslim Brotherhood chief Mohammed Badie, over an August 2013 attack on a police station in Minya.

Death sentences had been given to 183 people over the deadly attack on the police station in the southern province in which 13 police officers were killed, before a retrial was ordered.

Around 700 people were tried again in this case today, defence lawyer Abdel Moneim Abdel Maqsood told AFP.

Sixty-six of the 700 were sentenced to life imprisonment, which is 25 years in Egypt; 288 were acquitted; six have died since the first trial and the rest were sentenced to between three and 15 years in prison.

Badie (75) was today convicted of inciting his supporters to violence in the Minya case following the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

Badie, on trial in 35 cases related to the Brotherhood, has been sentenced to death in several of them but the verdicts have been overturned by the court of cassation. He got life sentences in more than five cases.

Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands arrested since the military ousted Morsi.

Uprising 

Elected after the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak, Morsi served as president for a year before being toppled after mass protests against his divisive rule.

His successor was former military chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whose regime has been accused of a campaign of repression to wipe out dissent.

The government has rejected the allegations, saying its priority is to reform the economy and fight “terrorism”, and accusing its detractors of seeking to harm Egypt’s interests.

On 8 September, a Cairo court sentenced 75 people to death, including other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The verdicts drew condemnation from human rights groups.

- © AFP 2018