20 February 2019

Egypt executes nine people over the prosecutor-general Hisham Barakat’s murder in 2015

On 20 February, Egyptian authorities executed nine young people condemned for Barakat’s murder despite human rights association’s appeals. Suspected members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the nine people tried in vain to appeal the sentence in February 2018. On 19 February, Amnesty International launched an alarm trying to avoid the sentence denouncing that: “There is no doubt that those involved in deadly attacks must be prosecuted and held accountable for their actions, but executing prisoners or convicting people based on confessions extracted through torture is not justice”. Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat died in June 2015 after a car bomb’s explosion near his convoy in the Egyptian capital. Since the beginning of the year, 15 people have been executed in Egypt. Maya Foa, the director of Reprieve, an anti-death penalty association, commented the executions stating that “President [Abdel Fattah] Al-Sisi’s use of the death penalty is now a full-blown human rights crisis”.

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