CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Thursday sentenced 24 Muslim Brotherhood members to death for allegedly killing police officers in two separate cases.
The Damanhour Criminal Court, north of the capital Cairo, convicted a group of 16 — including 6 in absentia — of several crimes, including the alleged bombing of a bus transporting police officers in the coastal Beheira governorate in 2015, TRT World reported quoting an unnamed judicial source.
The attack killed three policemen and wounded 33 others.
The other case, comprised of 8 Brotherhood members — including 2 in absentia — and tried by the same court, was over the killing of a policeman in 2014.
Capital punishment for civilian convicts in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, is carried out by hanging.
The verdicts can be appealed, the source added.
However, the Shehab Organization for Human Rights, which is outside Egypt, said the verdicts are final as they were issued by an emergency court.
There are no exact figures for death penalties issued in Egypt this year except for 10 handed down in April and those upheld against 12 Muslim Brotherhood leaders over the Rabaa sit-in dispersal case in 2013.
Egypt outlawed the Islamist group in 2013 following the military ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi.
Since leading the military takeover and becoming president, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, with thousands of its supporters jailed.
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928, calls for Islam to be at the heart of public life.
It established itself as the main opposition movement in Egypt despite decades of repression and has inspired spinoff movements and political parties across the Muslim world.
But it remains banned in several countries including Egypt.
Earlier this year, Amnesty International slammed Egypt’s ‘significant spike’ in recorded executions, which saw a more than threefold rise to 107 last year, from 32 in 2019.
