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| With its own kangaroo courts, the U.S. is in no position to criticize Egypt's dictators. (Photo by Private Manning Support) |
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A criminal court in the city of Minya sentenced 529 detainees to death on Monday after a single session of their mass trial, convicting them of murder for the killing of a police officer in the rioting last summer after the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Legal experts called the case the largest mass trial or conviction in the history of modern Egypt. It also was a surprising acceleration of the nine-month-old crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and liberal dissenters that followed his removal last July.
“We have never heard of anything of this magnitude before, inside or outside of Egypt, that was within a judicial system — not just a mass execution,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights who specializes in criminal justice.
“It is quite ridiculous,” he said, arguing that it would be impossible to prove that 500 people each played a meaningful role in the killing of a single police officer, especially after just one session of the trial. “Clearly this is an attempt to intimidate and terrorize the opposition, and specifically the Islamist opposition, but would the judge get so deeply involved in politics up to this point?”
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