An Egyptian court on Thursday sentenced Mahomud Ezzat, the 76-year-old top leader of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, along with other co-defendants to life in prison.
The Cairo Criminal Court on Sunday sentenced Ezzat, the acting supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, to life for espionage with several foreign organizations and parties, including the Palestinian Hamas movement, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and Lebanese Hezbollah and disclosure of national security information.
According to the prosecution’s investigation on the case that dates back to 2013, Ezzat and other Brotherhood members are charged with committing acts that undermine Egypt’s independence, unity and territorial integrity.
A life sentence in Egypt is 25 years in jail.
The official charges leveled against the defendants are communicating with foreign organizations to commit terrorist acts inside the country and finance terrorism.
Many of Egypt's senior Brotherhood leaders, including the late president Mohamed Morsi, have had the same charges of espionage for a foreign agent leveled against them in recent years.
Ezzat was arrested in August 2020 in Cairo, after being on the run for several years.
He was found guilty of “incitement to murder” and of having “supplied weapons” during clashes between demonstrators outside the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013.
In 2015, Ezzat was handed a death sentence in absentia, as well as given life imprisonment, after having been found guilty for having supervised the assassination of soldiers and government officials.
He was accused of involvement in the murder of the state prosecutor Hisham Barakat, who died in hospital after a car bomb tore through his convoy in Cairo in 2015.
The Brotherhood was blacklisted in Egypt in 2013 and deemed a terrorist group, months after Morsi's ouster.
