CAIRO: An Egypt court on Thursday sentenced four former security officials to life in jail for torturing to death an Egyptian citizen during investigations into the New Year's Day 2011 church bombing in Alexandria. The officers were sentenced in absentia, while a fifth official, the only one to have attended court sessions, was handed 15 years for his role in the torture and murder of Mohamed Sayyid Bilal. A life sentence in Egypt is 25 years. Bilal, 32, a young father of a two-year-old, was arrested following the bombing of the church in Alexandria, which killed over 20 people. He was beaten to death in an attempt to extract information or a confession into the bombing. Bilal, a religious man who frequently attended prayer and lessons at a local mosque, was an example of “good manners and clean name," activists have repeatedly said, but in the frenzy that followed the bombing, he was arrested along with dozens of others by the local police. They tortured and beat the “suspects" and Bilal was killed during the violence. At the time, Habib el-Adly, then interior minister – and currently jailed – accused the ultra-conservative Army of Islam, a Gaza-based militant group, of carrying out the attack, something it quickly denied. The case had sparked concern from the Coptic Christian community, who had long called for justice in Bilal's killing, arguing that he was not involved in the attack on Christians.
