CAIRO — An Egyptian emergency court on
Sunday sentenced former presidential candidate
Abdelmoneim Aboul Fotouh to 15
years in prison for “spreading false news” and “incitement against state institutions”,
judiciary sources said.
اضافة اعلان
Aboul Fotouh has been in detention since 2018 and
his trial began last November, though Egyptian law sets a legal cap of two
years for pretrial detention. The verdict cannot be appealed.
He was sentenced alongside 24 others, including
members of the
Muslim Brotherhood group, from which the former candidate had
defected years before. Also receiving a 15-year sentence was the Brotherhood’s
former supreme guide Mahmoud Ezzat, who is already serving multiple life
sentences on other charges.
Mohamed al-Qassas, the deputy head of Aboul Fotouh’s
Strong Egypt party, received a 10-year sentence, while the remaining defendants
were sentenced to between 10 years and life in prison.
Lawyer Khaled Ali, a prominent opposition figure and
himself a former presidential candidate, last month submitted what he said was
irrefutable evidence of Aboul Fotouh’s innocence.
Episodes of a TV series screened during the month of
Ramadan — featuring real-life footage of Aboul Fotouh criticizing the Brotherhood,
filmed by state intelligence without his knowledge — were used in his defense.
Amnesty
International condemned Sunday’s ruling, describing the trial as “grossly
unfair and politically-motivated” and alleging that the defendants had been
“subjected to a litany of abuses including torture”. The rights group also said
that Aboul Fotouh, 70, had been denied medical care for years.
In 2012, Aboul Fotouh was among a number of
candidates who ran unsuccessfully in elections that saw the Muslim Brotherhood’s
Mohamed Morsi voted into power. Morsi’s divisive rule lasted for just one year,
before he was ousted by then-defense minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi following
mass protests in July 2013.
The Brotherhood was subsequently declared a
terrorist organization and thousands of its members and sympathizers arrested
in an ensuing crackdown.
Aboul Fotouh was arrested in 2018 after he joined a
call to boycott that year’s presidential election, in which Sisi was reelected
with a landslide 97 percent of votes. Once a leading member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the former candidate had supported the mass protests against the
Islamists, before going on to become a critic of
Sisi and his ensuing clampdown
on dissent.
He was sacked from the Brotherhood’s leadership in 2009 and
has since denied any ongoing association with the group. Aboul Fotouh’s assets
have been frozen since he was arrested and added to the state’s terror list for
“leading a terrorist organization”.
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