Egypt’s Court of Cassation upheld on Tuesday a 15-year prison sentence against Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) leader Mohamed Al-Beltagy and Islamist preacher Safwat Hegazy in a torture case.
The pair were found guilty of holding a lawyer captive and torturing him during the 25 January Revolution in 2011 that was against former president Hosni Mubarak.
The Cairo Criminal Court issued its verdict in October 2014 and the Cassation Court upheld its ruling on Tuesday.
Al-Jazeera broadcaster Ahmed Mansour and former Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated MP Hazem Farouk were also sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Former minister of youth Osama Yassin, head of the legislative committee of the dissolved parliament Mahmoud Al-Khodeiry, and former Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated MPs Mohsen Rady and Amr Zaki were also convicted in the case and were handed three-year prison sentences.
The prosecutor general originally referred them to trial in November 2013 for the incident, which was said to have occurred on 3 February 2011 in the office of a tourism agency in Tahrir Square.
Lawyer Osama Kamal filed a lawsuit in 2011 accusing the defendants of illegally detaining and torturing him during the 18-day sit-in in Tahrir Square after they claimed he was a state security officer who refused to show his identity card.
Al-Beltagy and Hegazy were also sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of torturing police officers at the Rabaa sit-in in 2013.
The pair, among other defendants, received life sentences in June over the Wadi El-Natrun prison break in 2011. They were accused of damaging and setting fire to prison buildings, murder, attempted murder, and looting prison weapons.
