On Monday, BBC News said that a Minya court has sentenced 528 Muslim Brotherhood (MB) supporters to death. The news outlet said the death sentence verdicts were considered to be the biggest in Egyptian history.
The arrest and the subsequent conviction of the MB supporters stemmed from the serious crackdown by the military who have forcibly removed deposed President Mohammed Morsi from his seat in July last year. BBC said that the military intervention caused hundreds to their deaths and as much as 20,000 people were arrested on a plethora of charges, with the majority getting indicted on staging protests without obtaining government permission.
On the other hand, BBC cited a general consensus that much of the MB supporters that were convicted were Islamists. Among the many who were arrested and convicted were Morsi, his Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, Morsi's general guide Mohammed Badie, and several Islamist leaders like prominent political activists Ahmed Mahir, Ahmed Dumeh and Mohamed Adil. Journalists were not spared too in the military-sanctioned crackdown, with some of them employees of Qatari al-Jazeera TV, BBC said.
BBC said several political parties have expressed their dissatisfaction of the interim government's handling of the arrest and trial processes. They claimed that the current government of Egypt has committed several human rights violations. In a joint statement on February 10, BBC quoted the political parties, who said that activists were subject to random arrests and detention. Their statement also cited reports from human rights violations, which confirmed suspicions that the right to fair trial were not given to the detainees, and that torture was prevalent.
Some observers had commented that the crack on MB was making security in Egypt worse than before. It has been noted that attacks on army and the police by jihadist groups were on a regular basis beginning July last year in the Sinai Peninsula, and have now reached the mainland.
