A court in Alexandria has upheld Tuesday an earlier verdict sending a group of activists to two years in jail and fining them LE50,000 for organising an unauthorised protest during the Khaled Said murder retrial.
Mahienour El-Masry, Loai Mohamed Abdel-Rahman, Omar Abdel-Aziz Hussein, Islam Mohamed Ahmed, Nasser Abul-Hamed Ibrahim, Hassan Mostafa, Moussa Hussein, and Hassan El-Siyad were convicted of organising an unauthorised protest, blocking the road, assaulting a police officer and destroying a police vehicle on 2 December.
The initial verdict was issued in January, appealed in Feburary, where the court upheld the decision. However, some of the defendants were sentenced in abstentia, and they appealed the verdict for the second time.
This is another prosecution of non-Islamist activists under the 2013 controversial protest law.
On 22 December 2013, a Cairo criminal court sentenced April 6 Youth Movement founders Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel, and independent activist Ahmed Douma to three years in jail and a LE50,000 fine for organising an unauthorised protest and attacking security forces outside the Abdeen court in November.