Badie, 37 others win appeal in ‘Rabea operations room’ case

Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie’s appeal against his death sentence in the “Rabea operations room” case was accepted by the Cairo Court of Cassation on Thursday, along with appeals for 37 other people convicted in the case, the Reuters-affiliated news site Aswat Masriya reported.

The Cairo Criminal Court sentenced Badie and 13 co-defendants to death in April, while 26 others were sentenced to life in prison. The Court of Cassation has ordered a retrial before a different court, but dismissed the appeals of two defendants who were in absentia.

Badie has been sentenced to death in four separate cases, and sentenced to life in prison in five others.

A total of 51 defendants had been charged with forming an operations room from which they instructed Brotherhood members to resist the state and spread chaos in the country following the deadly dispersal of the Rabea al-Adaweya and Nahda Square sit-ins in August 2013, in which security forces killed at least 1,000 people.

Other Brotherhood leaders implicated in the case include Guidance Bureau chief Mahmoud Ghozlan, Saad al-Husseini, Gehad al-Haddad, Salah Soltan, Omar Malek and Ahmed Abu Baraka.

Three journalists who worked for the Brotherhood-affiliated Rassd News Network were also convicted, including Abdullah al-Fakharany, Samhy Mostafa and Amr Farrag, who currently lives in Turkey.

Mohamed Soltan, son of fugitive Brotherhood leader Salah Soltan, was sentenced to life in the case, but was deported to the United States in May once he gave up his Egyptian citizenship. Sultan was held in jail for two years and was deported after undergoing the longest hunger strike in the history of Egyptian prisons to protest what he described as his unlawful detention.