Egyptian prison authorities affiliated with the Ministry of Interior executed a defendant named Mohamed Ahmed Abu Srei, convicted of carrying out a deadly attack and killing an army outpost officer in Ismailia in 2013.
Security and legal sources told Daily News Egypt that the execution took place in a Cairo prison, after the Military Court in Ismailia approved the death sentence, adding that the defendant was a member of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.
In November 2013, a drive-by attack targeting a checkpoint on the Cairo-Ismailia road killed a military officer named Ahmed Farouk Mandour. He died on the same day from injuries he sustained.
Abu Srei, who was executed Tuesday morning, was charged with targeting and killing Mandour and accused of “joining militant groups and taking part in killing a number of army and police personnel in Sinai,” the sources said.
At the beginning of January 2018, four other men were convicted by a military court for killing three military students in a bombing in 2014 were hanged, in what is known as the Kafr Al-Sheikh Stadium case. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) has previously described the verdicts as legalised “oppression” and called the authorities to annul the sentence and order a retrial.
The organisation also pointed out that military investigations cited the inability of security cameras to detect the perpetrators.
The number of cases referred to military prosecution has increased since the ouster of Islamist former president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. Egypt’s military trials are held in military zones, which are restricted to civilians, and are usually led by high-ranking military officers.
In December, Egypt hanged 15 men convicted of attacks that killed security forces in central and North Sinai in the largest mass execution in the country since the 2011 revolution and since President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi took office in 2014.
The last wave of executions was when six alleged and convicted militants were hanged in 2015.
Egypt extended a state of emergency following recent mass attacks on civilians and security personnel, and President Al-Sisi demanded that security forces confront militancy all over the country with “brutal force.”
The latest violent attack took place when militants attacked the Rawda mosque in Sinai killing more than 300 people, the largest such attack in modern Egyptian history.
A state of emergency in North Sinai was first declared in 2013 by then-interim president Adly Mansour, who came into power following the ouster of Morsi. The state of emergency has been extended following last year’s extremist attacks on Coptic churches during Palm Sunday.
Since 2013, state security forces, represented by both the army and the police, have been engaged in violent clashes with “Sinai Province”, a group previously known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis. In 2014, the group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (IS) and has frequently launched deadly attacks on army and police checkpoints.
Over 200 of the group’s alleged members have faced trials in more than six different cases over accusations of committing dozens of crimes, including assassinations of police officers and an attempt on the former interior minister’s life, in addition to bombing security directorates in Cairo and Daqahleya.
