Cairo - On

Sunday, the Egyptian authorities carried out a death sentence against a prisoner accused of attempting to assassinate a security official, while about 70 others are awaiting execution in political cases, after they had exhausted all levels of litigation.

Local media reported that the Prison Authority carried out a death sentence on Sunday morning against Moataz Mustafa Hassan, who was convicted of attempting to assassinate Major General Mostafa El-Nimr, Director of Alexandria Security, in the Cairo Appeal Prison, while the body was transferred to the Zeinhom Morgue in Cairo, in preparation for handing it over to his family for burial.

Jurists, including Haitham Abu Khalil, denounced the implementation of the new death sentence issued against a student at the Faculty of Engineering, stressing that it is a "new execution of the innocent."

The Supreme State Security Criminal Court had sentenced 3 defendants to death by hanging in the case, which includes 11 defendants, two of whom are imprisoned and the rest are fugitives.

A report by an independent Egyptian human rights organization showed that 69 citizens are awaiting execution after exhausting all levels of litigation;

So that the death sentences issued against them become enforceable.

The report issued by the "Egyptian Network for Human Rights" included a detailed statement of the names of detainees awaiting execution after they became final, the dates of their arrest, the numbers and names of the cases in which they were accused, and the dates of their sentences.

The organization stated that "all detainees faced various types of violations, starting with arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances for varying periods in secret detention places where they suffered various types of torture."

She pointed out that some of them were tried before military courts and others before terrorism circuits, leading to random death sentences issued against them in political cases that did not meet the lowest standards of fair trials.

It was not possible to obtain immediate comment from the competent Egyptian authorities on the report, but they usually affirm their commitment to human rights standards and fair litigation procedures.

Among the figures whose death sentence was upheld by the Egyptian Court of Cassation last June 14, are 12 political detainees in the case known as the “Raba’a sit-in dispersal,” among them prominent Brotherhood leaders: Abdel Rahman al-Bar and Muhammad al-Beltagy, preacher and political activist Safwat Hegazy, and former Minister of Youth Osama Yassin.

The Egyptian Network for Human Rights demanded a halt to the executions and a retrial of the accused in a fair, transparent and impartial manner.

It also stressed the need to suspend recent death sentences against politicians and criminals alike, "due to the growing doubts about the fairness of the judicial departments that issue the current sentences."

It also called for the abolition of all terrorism circuit courts, stopping the referral of civilians to military courts, and stopping the work of the Supreme State Security Courts (emergency).

On more than one occasion, international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, condemned the judicial rulings and executions of politicians in Egypt.

According to "Amnesty International", Egypt is carrying out an unprecedented rate of executions, under the government of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, which made it the third country in the world in terms of the number of executions in 2020.

In October and November alone, Egyptian authorities executed at least 57 men and women, 49 of them within 10 days, including at least 15 men convicted of political violence after unfair trials, Human Rights Watch said.

The wave of executions continued in the first half of this year, with at least 51 executions, 9 of them during the holy month of Ramadan;

One of them was executed against an 82-year-old man.