• EGYPT
  • March 15, 2014
  • 3 minutes read

Rights Activist Khaled Hamza, Four Muslim Brotherhood Leaders in Military Court March 17

Rights Activist Khaled Hamza, Four Muslim Brotherhood Leaders in Military Court March 17

Khaled Hamza, the founder and lead consultant of the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website in English ‘Ikhwanweb’, along with a number of leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are the first of the group’s leaders to stand trial before military courts since the adoption of the junta’s constitution. They are to make their first appearance in court on March 17, 2014.


Earlier, on February 25, the Egyptian border guards on the southern borders of the country announced (according to military spokesman Col. Ahmed Mohamed Ali) that five Brotherhood members had been arrested while trying to leave Egypt across the Sudanese borders.


The military spokesman said at the time that those arrested were: Adel Mostafa Qatamish, former deputy governor of northern Sinai; Ali Ezzedin Thabit, member of the Muslim Brotherhood Shura Council and member of the Executive Office of the Freedom and Justice Party; Khaled Hamza, rights activist, founder of the Brotherhood’s Ikhwanweb and member of the Arab Commission for Human Rights; Zine El-Abdeen Mahmoud, a teacher in Al-Arish (in northern Sinai); Tariq Ismail Ahmed, Mechanical Engineer in Al-Arish, too.


This is the first military trial faced by Muslim Brotherhood leaders since the coup that illegally overthrew President Mohamed Morsi, although earlier Rassd News Network reporters were referred to a military court (supposedly for insulting the armed forces) in February 2014.


At the time (February), the North Cairo military prosecutor referred Amr Salama Al Qazaz, a Rassd founder; Islam Al-Homsi, director of Rassd’s Social Media department; an Egyptian army conscript; and two youths to the Military Court of Misdemeanors, accused of responsibility for "leaking" recordings by the coup defense minister Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and for "attempting to insult the armed forces".