CAIRO: Fourteen people went on trial Saturday for assisting in three terrorist attacks last year in Cairo that killed two French tourists and an American.
All 14 defendants, two of whom are women, pleaded innocent to charges that included collaborating in the April 2005 attacks, the unlicensed possession of weapons, ammunition and explosives, harboring fugitives and belonging to a banned group.
Egyptian authorities said at the time of the incident that the perpetrators had established an extremist Islamist group.
In the first of the three attacks, on the fringes of Cairo s Khan Al-Khalili bazaar, the bomber and three foreigners died and 18 people were wounded.
In the second, only the bomber died when he leapt from a bridge behind the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo, landing near a tourist bus. Nine people were wounded, four of them foreigners.
A few hours later, two fully veiled women opened fire on a tourist bus near the Cairo Citadel. They failed to cause any casualties, but one of the pair shot dead her accomplice before turning the gun on herself and later died in a hospital.
On Saturday, all the defendants appeared at the Cairo emergency security court in the caged dock. Five others implicated in the attacks are dead. Four died carrying them out, and the other in police custody.
The prosecutor told the court that the defendants had confessed during interrogation to buying the materials for and making the bombs used in the incidents. Gamal Ahmed Abdel-Al, a 25-year-old male defendant, after asking permission to address the court, said that he and the others were tortured for refusing to confess to crimes we haven t committed.
A member of the defense team, whose name was not immediately available, told the court that the detainees were tortured in prison and were denied visits by their family members for over a year.
A member of their volunteer defense team, lawyer Mukhtar Nouh, said the Interior Ministry had framed the defendants because it could not identify the real culprits and wanted to improve its image among the public.
One of the female defendants, Seham Qammar Zaman, a 47-year-old woman, screamed hysterically from the dock before collapsing.
After the charges were read and the pleas given, the trial was adjourned until October 21.
Meanwhile, 15 people are currently on trial in Ismailia for attacks on tourist resorts in the Sinai Peninsula in October 2004 and July 2005. Agencies
