Court cases that caught public attention over the past year have been nothing short of dramatic, with many verdicts taking an unexpected, but generally accepted, twist. The biggest case in 2008 involving real estate mogul Hisham Talaat Moustafa, who was accused of ordering the death of Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim in July 2008, was ruled upon last May, where Moustafa and his accomplice Mohsen Al-Sukkari, the ex-cop hit man, were sentenced to death. Another death sentence was meted out by the Giza Criminal Court in June to 19-year-old Mahmoud Sayed Abdel Hafez Essawy for the murder of Heba El-Akkad and Nadine Khaled in their Sixth October City residence in November 2008. All three death sentences are being appealed or are in the process. Hidelina On Nov. 19, the South Cairo Criminal Court issued its final verdict in the notorious Hidelina contaminated blood bags case, sentencing former MP Hani Sorour; Helmi Salah Al-Din, general manager of blood affairs department at the Ministry of Health; Mohamed Wagdan, chairman of the technical center in Hidelina (Sorour's factory which manufactures the blood bags); Nivan Sorour, Hidelina board member and Sorour's sister, all to three years in prison. The court, headed by Magdy Qonsowa, also sentenced three of the company's employees; Wafaa Abdel Rahim, Ashraf Ishaq and Fathia Ahmed Abdel Rahim to six months with labor. They were all charged in absentia. In 2008, the Cairo Appeals Court overturned a previous Criminal Court ruling exonerating those implicated in the Hidelina case and ordered a retrial upon the request of Prosecutor General Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud. "Veil martyr Also in November, Alex Wiens, 28, was sentenced to life in prison - 15 years with no chance of parole - in a court in the eastern German city of Dresden which found him guilty of murdering Marwa El-Sherbini, the Egyptian pharmacist dubbed the "veil martyr. On July 1, in the same courthouse, Wiens had plunged a seven-inch kitchen knife at least 16 times into El-Sherbini, 31 and three-months pregnant at the time with her second child, in an Islamophobic crime that shocked the world. Child marriages A month before, the Zefta Misdemeanors Court in Gharbeya sentenced 45-year-old Muslim marriage registrar (ma'zoun) to a two-year suspended jail sentence and a LE 1,000 fine for conducting the marriage of 114 girls under the legal age of 18. Commenting on the landslide verdict, which was the first of its kind in Egypt, human rights advocate Gamal Eid, head of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, told Daily News Egypt in a previous interview that the ruling is an "important step towards the elimination of child marriages. Businesswoman returns In mid October, the Cairo Misdemeanors Court sentenced Egyptian businesswoman Hoda Abdel Moneim, 62, to six years in prison for a bank fraud offence she committed in the 1980s, activating a former 10-year sentence with hard labor she received in absentia. Abdel Moneim, who had fled Egypt in 1986 when a court order was issued banning her from travel, was arrested at the airport as she entered Egypt. Human trafficking In September 2009, the South Cairo Criminal Court sentenced 11 people involved in a baby purchase plot to between two and five years in jail. The group was found guilty of "human trafficking through buying and selling four newly born babies and smuggling them outside the country to sell them to foreigners, Chancellor Al-Mohammadi Qonsowa said. Mariam Ragheb Rezk Allah, who runs an orphanage; George Saed Louis Ghali, a surgeon; and Gamil Khalil Bekheit, were all slammed a five-year jail sentence with labor and a LE 100,000 fine, while Iris Nabil Abdel Meseih Botrous and her husband Louis Andraous along with Suzanne Hagolf, Medhat Metias and Ashraf Hassan Moustafa were sentenced to two years in jail with labor. The court also handed down the same two-year sentence to Raafat Atallah, Josephine Al-Kess Matah Gerges, and Atef Roushdy Amin Hana, who were all at large. Botrous, Andraous, Atallah and Gerges were fined LE 100,000. The legal defense team had rejected the "human trafficking charges, claiming that due to the absence of adoption laws for Egypt's Copts, the defendants had to go around the law. Military tribunal The upcoming 2010 is expected to get a hot start with the Muslim Brotherhood trial to receive a final verdict in January. In October, a Cairo Administrative Court adjourned till Jan. 12 the appeal hearing of 13 Muslim Brotherhood members who were sentenced to prison terms in a military court in 2007. The 13 detainees are part of a group of 25 leading members of the banned Islamist group who were given three to 10 years on charges of financing an illegal group and money laundering, and include chief financier Khairat El-Shater. The military tribunal had raised several due-process concerns and attracted international condemnation because the men were acquitted of the same charges before a civilian court, only to be rearrested inside the court room and immediately re-charged with the same crimes before a military court. Al-Balagh The year 2010 will also see a ruling in the court case filed by the Egyptian Actors' Syndicate against an independent tabloid Al-Balagh (whose license was immediately revoked) for publishing an allegedly defamatory report claiming that several popular Egyptian actors were part of a homosexual orgy in an Egyptian hotel. -Daily News Egypt
