Al Jazeera journalist Egyptian Baher Mohamed, right, attending his trial at the Torah prison in Cairo yesterday.

An Egyptian court yesterday postponed delivering its verdict in the retrial of three Al Jazeera TV journalists, a decision a defence lawyer said was to avoid bad publicity during a visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry and other dignitaries.
It was the second time the verdict in the internationally sensitive case has been postponed, this time to August 29.
The three men were originally sentenced to between seven and 10 years in prison on charges including spreading lies to help a “terrorist” organisation.
The journalists deny the charges and Egypt’s high court
ordered a retrial in January.
Mohamed Fahmy, a naturalised Canadian who has given up his Egyptian citizenship, and Egyptian Baher Mohamed were released on bail in February after more than a year in custody.
Australian Peter Greste, was deported in February.
Al Jazeera English’s acting managing director Giles Trendle denounced the postponement of court verdict.
“This is very frustrating,” Trendle said.
“This long-running saga has been going on and on and on, if we go back to the original verdict it was quashed by a court of appeals that said that the evidence was contradictory and flawed and this was way back earlier in this year and so we are just waiting for the  justice to be done. At the moment, the justice is delayed and justice delayed is not justice done,” he added.
Trendle criticised the process saying, “The judicial system has been almost Kafkaesque in some of the ludicrous groundless charges, in some of the strange decisions, even in the delays that you are seeing. The adjournment, I believe this is the 10th one in recent times. We can make calls, we can make campaigns but at the end of the day the decision lies in Cairo, in the court in Cairo.”
He said that the #FreeAJStaff campaign was now in its 19th month since Baher, Fahmy and Greste were arrested in December 2013 and since then there had been a groundswell of support on social media from organisations and human right groups.
Trendle urged people to continue the calls for “Journalism is not a crime”, saying: “There has been a tremendous campaign and we thank everybody who has been behind that campaign, world leaders, international media, human rights organisations, the general public as well as our own staff of course, and we thank everybody who has been involved in that campaign and the campaign will go on until we can get justice for our people.”


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