Fourteen Salafi leaders were acquitted by the Cairo Criminal Court on Sunday, after their preventative detention period had expired.
The individuals are expected to be released from different police stations nationwide on Monday.
According to the defendants’ lawyer Khaled Al-Masry, the prosecution did not appeal the court’s decision. However, the defendants will be under probation by security officials.
Probation usually forces the released individuals to stay in the same governorate, retire from social and political public work, and physically present themselves to a police station every day.
The defendants include controversial Islamist preacher Mahmoud Shaaban, who had been arrested in November 2014, on accusations of mobilising supporters for a day of protests, under the slogan of “the Muslim Youth Uprising“.
The protest took place on 28 November 2014, when protesters chanted against the “anti-Islamic stance of the Egyptian state”. Two people were killed in the protests.
The other defendants are members of an ultraconservative group called the Salafi Front, who spearheaded the calls for the protests.
The news was welcomed by Salafi circles, who usually compare political detainees with war prisoners.
In a previous interview with Daily News Egypt, Ashraf El–Sherif, a professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, said that the Salafi Front is part of “scientific Salafism”, whose supporters had withdrawn from the political sphere after the deadly dispersal of the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in in 2013.
