The Egyptian authorities on Monday, 26 April 2021 executed 17 detainees, related to Case No. 12749 of 2013, known in the media as “storming the Kerdasa police station”, according to We Record human rights organization.
Among those who were executed, and their relatives were officially notified of their execution are two elderly people: Sheikh Abdel Rehim Gibril and Sheikh Mostafa Al Qarfash, who are both teachers of the Holy Qur’an.
In the same case, the authorities executed: Abdullah Abdel-Qawi, Ahmad AlAyyat, Ahmad Owais Hammouda, Walid Saad Abu Omeira,
Mohamed Abu Al Saud, Ashraf Rizk, Essam Abdel-Moati, Ahmed Abdel Nabi, Badr Abdel Nabi, Qutb Qutb, Omar Mohamed Al Sayed, Izzat Al Attar, Ali Kenawy, Mohamed Yousef Al Saidi, Ahmed Abdel Salam, and Arafat Abdel Latif.
The Cairo Criminal Court had previously sentenced 20 defendants to death related to the Kerdasa case, in which the Egyptian authorities claimed that the defendants killed 14 policemen. However, the defendants as well as their relatives used to deny such claims or any connection to the Kerdasa events, accusing authorities of blatantly fabricating the charges.
Sheikh Mohammad Al Sagheer, member of the Board of Trustees of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, former Adviser to the Minister of Endowments, and Under-Secretary of the Religious Committee of the Egyptian Parliament, commented on his Twitter account saying: “Sheikh Abdel Rehim Gibril, eighty years old, was executed today in the holy month of Ramadan without regard for age or the sanctity of the month. I bear witness to God Almighty, and He is the most knowledgeable, and everyone who knows Sheikh Gibril knows that the man devoted his life to teaching the Qur’an, and has traveled to many countries reciting the holy Qur’an, where people loved his beautiful voice and his good manners .. Sufficient for us is Allah, and He is the best Disposer of affairs.
Haytham Abo Khalil, TV presenter and Human Rights Activist, tweeted saying:
Do you want an evidence that Sisi executed 17 innocent people today in order to appease the police, whose coming task is to suppress the Egyptians when the second filling of the Renaissance Dam begins, and people feel thirsty and be forced to drink sewage water?
This is the evidence: the same witness for evidence is the same witness for denial, as he recorded his testimony in order to acquit one of the innocent people Sheikh Abdel Rehim Gibril. Despite that, Sisi executed the innocent man. #Sisi_killer #Kerdasa.
On Tuesday 2 March 2021, authorities executed 11 people in the Borg Al-Arab prison in the coastal city of Alexandria, in the country’s north. Two days before, on Saturday, they executed five persons, including three women.
Normally the Ministry of Interior does not announce beforehand that it is carrying out executions and it notifies the families of executed inmates only after their deaths so they can receive the bodies for burial.
Authorities have not identified the 16 persons who have been executed or the nature of the criminal cases in which they were sentenced.
Last December, the international human rights watchdog Amnesty International criticized what it described as a “horrifying execution spree” in Egypt.
The human rights organization Community for Justice documented 87 executions carried out by Egyptian authorities in the two months of October and December 2020, which it describes as a record number.
Some 41 Egyptian opposition figures early March called on the Biden administration to take action against the Egyptian regime, saying it had committed “crimes that are worse than the [Jamal] Khashoggi murder.”
The signatories of the statement stated that “the dictatorial regime ruling Egypt has committed many crimes that are uglier and much more terrifying than Khashoggi’s murder.”
The opposition cited some of what they described as “the crimes of the Egyptian regime”, stating that “among these crimes were the military coup against the elected president in 2013, committing genocide against thousands of Egyptians which have been documented by international human rights organizations.”
Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi took office in 2014, following his victory in the first presidential elections after the overthrow of late President Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013 when the former was minister of defense.
The statement said: “This comes on top of tens of thousands of murders, torture, enforced disappearances, and executing death sentences issued in trials that did not meet the conditions for a fair trial.”
The Egyptian opposition asked: “Does the US Democratic administration led by Joe Biden have the power to set the record straight and respect principles of justice and American values?”
