Two Egyptian courts on Thursday sentenced 99 supporters of ousted president Mohammad Mursi to prison for allegedly committing acts of violence and assaulting policemen during recent demonstrations
Two Egyptian courts on Thursday sentenced 99 supporters of ousted president Mohammad Mursi to prison for allegedly committing acts of violence and assaulting policemen during recent demonstrations, judicial sources have said.
The Shubra Criminal Court sentenced four Mursi supporters to ten years in jail each and six others to seven years each, while slapping a minor with a suspended one-year jail term for allegedly committing acts of violence and damaging public property in October.
Once the judges read out the sentences, the ten convicted men chanted slogans against the court and "military rule."
The verdicts can, however, still be appealed at a higher court within 60 days, a judicial source said.
The same court sentenced Abdullah Barakat, a former faculty dean at Al-Azhar University, and Hossam al-Merghani, a Muslim Brotherhood leader from the northern Cairo province of Qalioubiya, to 25 years in prison each for blocking a road in the same province last year.
The court also fined the two men 20,000 Egyptian pounds (roughly $2,800) each, dismissed them from their posts and put them under probation for five years.
The two were part of ten defendants (out of a total of 47 people involved in the case) who were sentenced to death in absentia on July 5, even though they had been arrested two weeks earlier.
The court later retried them, reducing the sentence to 25 years behind bars.
The Kaf al-Sheikh Criminal Court, meanwhile, sentenced 73 people to 15 years in jail each, nine others to ten years each in jail, and four others to suspended one-year jail terms for allegedly committing acts of violence outside a local police station.
A large number of supporters of Mursi, Egypt's first freely-elected president, have landed in jail since the military ousted the Islamist leader in the summer of last year.
Many of the ousted president's supporters have been accused by authorities of inciting and committing violence.
