(Photo by Ahmed Al-Malky)
Cairo Criminal Court is trying Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) leader Mohamed Al-Beltagy and Islamist preacher Safwat Hegazy for holding a lawyer captive, and torturing and sexually assaulting him in 2011.
Accused alongside Al-Beltagy and Hegazy are former youth minister Osama Yassin, head of the legislative committee of the dissolved parliament Mahmoud Al-Khodeiry, Al-Jazeera broadcaster Ahmed Mansour, and three former Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated members of parliament: Mohsen Rady, Amr Zaki and Hazem Farouk.
The prosecutor general referred them to trial in November 2013 for the incident that is said to have occurred on 3 February 2011 in the office of a tourism company in Tahrir Square, which at the time was the focal point for protests against then President Hosni Mubarak.
Al-Beltagy and Hegazy were sentenced to 20 years in jail for torture and leading a terrorist group on 9 September 2014. They were sentenced to ten years on charges of kidnapping and torturing two policemen at the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in in August 2013. The pair received an additional ten years for “being in command of a terrorist group”, while two others, who were doctors at the sit-in’s field hospital, received five years for joining a terrorist group.
Al-Beltagy, who was secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, the FJP – which was dissolved in August – was arrested in a rural village in Giza. Hegazy, a controversial preacher closely associated with the Brotherhood, was arrested on the Siwa-Matruh road, close to the Libyan border in August. Al-Beltagy is also being tried alongside former president Mohamed Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders for inciting violence outside the Presidential Palace on 5 December 2012. The alleged violence resulted in at least 11 deaths and 693 injuries.
The protest camp at Rabaa Al-Adaweya emerged in support of Morsi towards the end of June 2013 in response to the rising popularity of the Tamarod (Rebellion) movement, which called for the Islamist president to announce early presidential elections.
Morsi was ousted on 3 July 2013 following mass protests, in which the military backed the protesters and intervened.
