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An Egyptian
court has sentenced ex-President Mohamed Morsi to death over a 2011 mass prison
break. The verdict will now be handed over to the country’s Grand Mufti and a
final decision will be reached on June 2.
Morsi is among a total of 106 Muslim Brotherhood
members sentenced to capital punishment over the incident. The Wadi al-Natrun
prison break took place during the 2011 January revolution and eventually led
to the deposition of Hosni Mubarak.
RT.com reports:
On January 28, 2011, Morsi was arrested along with 24
Muslim Brotherhood leaders and put into Wadi al-Natrun prison in Cairo, but he
escaped two days later. Following the prison break, several other prisons saw
multiple riots and thousands of inmates escaped.
According to prosecutors, the prisons were attacked by
members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, intending to free
Islamist inmates.
Some outlets previously reported Morsi was sentenced
to death for passing state secrets to foreign groups, including the Palestinian
militant Hamas group and Lebanon's Hezbollah, during his one year in office.
However, that verdict does not include his name.
An official from the Muslim Brotherhood, Amr Darrag,
has urged the international community to bring pressure to bear to prevent the
ex-president’s death sentence.
"This is a political verdict and represents a
murder crime that is about to be committed, and it should be stopped by the
international community," Darrag told Reuters.
The court is also seeking the death penalty for
Khairat Shater, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood for conspiring with
foreign militant groups, according to Reuters.
Many of those 122 sentenced to death were tried in
absentia, including Yusuf Qaradawi, an Egyptian Islamic theologian, who is now
living in Qatar.
All the cases will now be referred to the country’s
Grand Mufti, Shawki Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allam, the highest official of
religious law, who will issue a final legal opinion.
Amnesty International has condemned Morsi’s death
sentence, calling it "a charade based on null and void procedures."
The group demanded the immediate release of Egypt’s former president.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan also slammed the
court decision and accused Western countries of hypocrisy, the Anatolian news
agency reported.
"While the West is abolishing the death penalty,
they are just watching the continuation of death sentences in Egypt. They don't
do anything about it," he said.
The ousted leader is already serving a 20-year
sentence. On April 21, he was convicted on charges linked to the killing of
protesters outside Cairo’s presidential palace in December 2012.
Egypt first fell into turmoil four years ago with the
onset of the Arab Spring and the ouster of Hosni Mubarak who ruled the country
from 1981 to 2011. During the revolution headed by the Muslim Brotherhood,
about 1,000 people were killed and more than 6,000 injured.
Morsi himself was then removed by Field Marshal Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi in June 2013. Opponents had been accusing him of trying to
monopolize political power by proposing an openly Islamist constitution,
stuffing the bureaucracy with his associates and banning the courts from
overruling his decisions.
The
unrest that followed those events killed over 1,000, including women and
children, according to HRW.
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