Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie (centre)gestures while he stands in the defendants’ cage with fellow Brotherhood members in a Cairo court yesterday.
Reuters/Cairo
Mohamed Badie, top leader of Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, was sentenced to life in jail along with 14 others yesterday on charges of murder and inciting violence during clashes near Cairo last year.
The session had been summoned for witness statements but the judge surprised journalists and others present by issuing a verdict. Badie, 71, is among hundreds of Brotherhood members already sentenced to death in mass trials that have drawn criticism from Western governments and human rights groups.
The death sentences are subject to appeal.
In what is known as the Bahr al-Azam case, Badie and the other defendants were convicted of the murder of five people and the attempted murder of 100 others during violence that broke out in Giza on July 15, 2013.
Then-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi toppled president Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood on July 3, 2013 after protests against his rule.
Egyptian authorities have since arrested thousands of Brotherhood supporters, sentencing hundreds to death or long prison sentences, while Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement has been banned and designated a terrorist organisation.
Sisi, who went on to win a presidential election, vowed in his campaign that the Brotherhood, once among Egypt’s most formidable political movements, would cease to exist under him.
Mursi, freely elected in 2012, is also on trial on a variety of charges including inciting violence and conspiring with a foreign power, and could face the death penalty if convicted.
Egypt’s Brotherhood renounced violence as a means of political change decades ago and argues that it has been robbed of political power won fairly at the ballot box.
Badie and 182 Muslim Brotherhood supporters were sentenced to death in a mass trial last June over violence that erupted in Minya governorate which led to the killing of a police officer.
A court sentenced Badie to life in prison in a separate case in July for inciting violence and blocking a major road north of Cairo during protests that followed Mursi’s ouster. He received another life sentence last month, on separate counts of inciting violence in clashes near a mosque in Giza.
Also yesterday, prominent activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was released on bail ahead of his retrial on charges of violating a protest law, triggering celebrations by dozens of supporters in the courtroom.
Abdel Fattah, a leading secular figure in the 2011 revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak, and other defendants facing similar charges were freed from a courtroom cage immediately after the judge’s ruling and were swamped by friends and family.
A total of 25 defendants - including Abdel Fattah - had been sentenced to 15 years each in absentia in June for violating a law that seeks to curtail demonstrations - legislation branded repressive by rights groups.
Abdel Fattah and two others were later arrested, an event which in Egyptian law prompts a retrial in the same court.
But the judge, Mohamed Ali al-Fiki, said yesterday he would no longer look into the case and asked that it be transferred to another court. Fiki said he had taken the decision because a lack of respect for the court had put him in an embarrassing position.
The judge did not elaborate but asked the prosecution to investigate how a family video that was unrelated to Abdel Fattah’s case had been included as evidence. The airing of the footage at the previous hearing on September 10 had caused uproar among the defendants as it showed a private family celebration.
“Thank God for these decisions,” said Khaled Ali, one of the defence lawyers and a former presidential candidate. “The defence had asked for the court to step aside because of an enmity between the court and the accused.”
Dozens of activists, political detainees and relatives of the defendants had begun hunger strikes in recent weeks to demand their release and call for an end to the protest law.
The law, passed last year, gives the interior ministry the power to ban any public gathering of more than 10 people and has added to fears that freedoms won during the 2011 uprising were being rolled back.
Abdel Fattah has been in and out of jail since 2011, missing the birth of his child and the death of his father Ahmed Seif al-Islam, one of Egypt’s best-known human rights activists.
In a letter to the court during the last hearing, Abdel Fattah asked to be freed on bail to be with his family in their time of grief. He also asked the judges to step down and allow for a fresh trial in another court.
Tourism in Egypt ‘could fully recover’ next year
Reuters/Cairo
Egypt’s tourism industry, battered by three years of political upheaval, violence and street protests, could fully recover by the end of next year if regional turmoil does not spread to the Arab world’s biggest country, the tourism minister said.
While Egypt is by no means wholly stable, Hisham Zaazou said in an interview late on Sunday that he hoped tourist numbers would rise by up to 10% this year, and recover to pre-uprising levels of 14.7mn visitors in 2015.
“If the relative stability that exists now continues I imagine there will be a (full) recovery,” Zaazou said.
Sea resorts and ancient sites are the backbone of the Egyptian tourism industry—a pillar of the whole economy—and have mostly escaped attack by militants, but Zaazou said he would also promote desert safaris, trekking and spa tourism.
“A prerequisite is stability and this is happening,” he said.
Once peaking at $12.5bn a year, tourism revenues were less than half that in 2013 as upheaval in the run-up to the army’s ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Mursi put off foreign visitors.
More than 14.7mn tourists visited Egypt in 2010, dropping to 9.8mn in 2011. The number of visitors picked up in 2012 to 11.5mn but shrank to 9.5mn last year.
Tourist revenue in the first half of 2014 was $3bn, down 25% from a year earlier, the government said in August. Government figures had shown tourism contributed 11.3% of GDP and 14.4% of foreign currency revenues.
Although tourists have been slowly reappearing in hotels this year, especially from other Arab states, a deterioration of the security situation in the Middle East poses a further threat to the sector.
The rapid advance of Islamic State has worried governments across the region.
“The idea of trying to secure our country and ensure that this kind of threat does not infiltrate and come into Egypt is definitely of concern for the government and the president,” Zaazou said.
“As soon as you have a disruption in this kind of relatively stable environment that we are enjoying at the moment for sure this will affect tourism negatively. I believe the government is extremely aware of that,” he said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and other senior officials this weekend during a regional tour aimed at building an international coalition against Islamic State.
The Al Qaeda offshoot has been coaching Egypt’s most active militant group, Sinai-based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, an Ansar commander recently told Reuters.
The Egyptian group has killed hundreds of soldiers and policemen since Mursi’s ouster.
Egypt is also closely monitoring Islamic State-inspired militants who operate just over the border in the chaos of post-Gaddafi Libya and are seeking to topple the Cairo government.
“Definitely it does concern me. We are now looking like a green oasis in the middle of this desert, of this turmoil around us both in Libya, what’s happening in Iraq and Syria,” Zaazou said.
The bombing of a tourist bus in the Sinai which killed two South Koreans and an Egyptian driver in February revived memories of an Islamist uprising in the 1990s that often targeted tourists and took years to crush.
But Egyptian tourism has survived big setbacks in the past.
On November 17, 1997 Islamic militants descended on Queen Hatshepsut’s temple near the Nile town of Luxor. In a short time they shot or hacked to death 58 tourists and four Egyptians.
The following January and February, visitor numbers were down almost 60% from the previous year. Yet the industry staged a remarkable comeback.
