Egypts ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi sits in a cage in the police academy

courthouse in Cairo.
Nadia Khomami, and agencies in Cairo and Istanbul
@nadiakhomami
Saturday 16 May 2015 06.35 EDTLast modified on Saturday 16 May
201509.38 EDT

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An Egyptian court has sentenced the ousted president Mohamed Morsi to

death for his part in a mass jailbreak in 2011.
The verdict, by judge Shaaban el-Shami, was announced on Saturday in a
Cairo court where Morsi was also facing charges of espionage. As is
customary in passing capital punishment, the death sentence on Morsi
and more than 100 others will be referred to the countrys top Muslim
theologian, or mufti, for his non-binding opinion.
Morsi, Egypts first freely elected president, was ousted by the military in
July 2013 after days of mass street protests by Egyptians demanding that
he be removed because of his divisive policies.
His overthrow triggered a government crackdown on the Muslim
Brotherhood movement, to which he belongs, in which hundreds of
people have died and thousands have been imprisoned.

In May 2014, Morsis successor, the former military chief Abdel Fatah alSisi, secured a landslide victory in Egypts presidential elections.
Before Saturdays sentencing, Morsi was already serving a 20-year term
on charges linked to the killing of protesters outside a Cairo presidential
palace in December 2012.
Defendants in both trials were brought into the caged dock on Saturday
ahead of the verdict. We are free revolutionaries, we will continue the
march, they chanted.
Morsi was not brought in, but his co-defendant and Brotherhood leader,
Mahmud Badie, was present, wearing the red uniform of those convicted
to death after a previous sentence.
In Saturdays first case, Morsi and 130 others, including dozens of
members of the Palestinian Hamas movement and Lebanons Shia
Hezbollah group, were accused of escaping from prisons and attacking
police during the 2011 uprising against the former Egyptian president
Hosni Mubarak.
Turkeys president, Tayyip Erdoan, criticised the decision to seek the
death penalty for Morsi and accused the west of hypocrisy, the state-run
Anatolian news agency reported.
The popularly elected president of Egypt, chosen with 52% of the vote,
has unfortunately been sentenced to death, Erdoan said at a rally in
Istanbul, to howls of protest from the crowd.
Egypt is turning back into ancient Egypt, he said, referring to the
Pharaonic rule of the land that ended more than two millennia ago.
The west, unfortunately, is still turning a blind eye to Sisis coup, he
added. While they abolished the death penalty in their own countries,
they just look on as spectators at this execution in Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been blamed for most of the unrest in
Egypt, which has resulted in the death of some 850 people. Egyptian

authorities designated it a terrorist group in December 2013, making even

verbal expressions of support punishable by imprisonment.
In Saturdays second case, Morsi and 35 co-defendants, including
Brotherhood leaders, were accused of conspiring with foreign powers,
Hamas and Shia Iran to destabilise Egypt.
Prosecutors said the defendants carried out espionage activity on behalf of
the international Muslim Brotherhood organisation and Hamas from
2005 to August 2013 with the aim of perpetrating terror attacks in the
country in order to spread chaos and topple the state.
Morsis supporters have said that the charges against him are politically
motivated. Rights groups have accused Sisis regime of using the judiciary
as a tool to oppress opposition, with Amnesty International denouncing
the death sentence as a charade based on null and void procedures.