THE RETRIAL in the Court of Cassation of billionaire property developer Hisham Talaat Mustafa and former State Security officer Mohsen El-Sukkari, has been delayed to 25 September due to the lawyers' work stoppage. On 26 May Judge Abdel-Salam Gomaa set 26 June as the date for defence and prosecution closing statements. But following a decision by the Bar Association Council that lawyers go on strike Mustafa and El-Sukkari's defence team announced they could not take part in the session. "We cannot disobey our syndicate. Our membership would be suspended for six months if we did so," said Farid El-Deeb, one of Mustafa's lawyers. The judge asked the defendants if they would like the court to assign them other lawyers, but El-Sukkari and Mustafa said they would stick with their defence team. The judge then postponed the case to the following Tuesday, in the hope that the work stoppage would have ended. It didn't. On Tuesday the defence team went to the judge's chamber and urged him to postpone the case until September. He agreed to the request. The retrial had opened on 26 April after the Court of Cassation found procedural errors in the first case and judged much of the evidence presented against the defendants to have been inadmissible. In May 2009 the Bab Al-Khalq Criminal Court handed down capital sentences to both defendants after eight months of hearings. Mustafa, 50, was found guilty of conspiring to murder Lebanese pop singer Suzanne Tamim and El-Sukkari, 41, of committing the murder. Tamim was murdered in her apartment at the Jumeira Beach Residence complex in Dubai on 28 July, 2008. Mustafa allegedly paid El-Sukkari $2 million for the contract killing after Tamim ended a three-year affair with him. The billionaire property developer and onetime member of the Shura Council was arrested on 2 September 2008, following the lifting of his parliamentary immunity.
