Egypt sentences 22 jihadists to death, including ex-police officer

Egyptian justice on Thursday sentenced 22 jihadists, including a former police officer, to death for 54 attacks including the assassination of an intelligence officer, a judicial source told AFP.

In addition to these death sentences, for which all appeals have been exhausted, the Court of Cassation also upheld prison sentences ranging from several years to life against 118 other defendants, the source added.

All those convicted are accused of being linked to Egyptian jihadist leader Hicham el-Achmawy, a former special forces officer who took up arms against the authorities and executed in March 2020.

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Accused of having played an important role in cross-border jihadist networks in North Africa, Achmawy, who left the Egyptian army in 2012, has long been one of the most wanted men in the country.

The military court also found him guilty of leading the jihadist group Ansar beit al-Maqdes, in the Sinai Peninsula, in the east of the country, where an insurgency is raging which has intensified after the dismissal of the Islamist president. Mohamed Morsi in 2013. Achmawy would have left Sinai for Libya in 2013, before Ansar Beit al-Maqdes made allegiance in November 2014 to the jihadist group Islamic State (IS), remaining close to the rival jihadist organization, Al- Qaeda.

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Since the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi and then his replacement by ex-Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, elected president in 2014, the repression of the opposition, from the Islamists to the liberals, has continued to gain in power.

Trials for "

" have multiplied and hundreds of death sentences have been handed down.

In April, Amnesty International reported that the number of executions in Egypt had tripled in 2020, making it the third country with the most executions in the world, after China and Iran.