CAIRO: The Prosecutor General referred on Wednesday eight protesters arrested earlier this week in Shubra to the Rod El-Farag Misdemeanor Court for an urgent trial to start Jan. 6. The defendants were remanded in custody to await their first hearing. The eight Muslim protesters were initially detained after police forces arrested them during a Monday protest in Shubra that condemned the recent New Year's Eve bombing in front of Al-Qeddesine Church (Church of the Two Saints) in Alexandria. The defense lawyers, affiliated with various human rights groups, had filed a complaint to the Prosecutor General against Head of the Abbasiya Prosecution Office Mohamed El-Dabe', accusing him of ignoring the law, intransigence with the detainees, and refusing to let defense lawyers read the interrogation reports. Afify Abdel-Maksoud, a lawyer at the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law, told Daily News Egypt that El-Dabe' refused all requests for contact between the detainees and their lawyers. “We [knew] about the detainment decision unofficially after El-Dabe' refused to give us access to it,” said Abdel-Maksoud. Abdel-Maksoud stated that six of the eight detainees are political activists with different political orientations. The other two, according to Abdel-Maksoud, have no history of protest participation but could have criminal records. “Having two detainees with a criminal record could be used to [provide] the public [with] a justification for their arrest,” said Abdel-Maksoud. The detainees were allegedly in a face-to-face confrontation with security forces during the protest, and were arrested after a member of the security forces identified four of them as having attacked security officers and vandalized four cars. The prosecution office accused the detainees with a long list of charges, such as participating in a gathering of more than five people, inciting sectarianism, beating judiciary arrest officers, vandalism of public property, injuring 15 security force officers and four policemen, and vandalizing nine private vehicles, 11 vans, two microbuses, and two police pick-up trucks. “Before the arrest the police would check the names of the protestors, permit the Copts to leave and keep who they believed were Muslim protestors inside the police cordon,” El Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of victims of Violence said in a statement. The statement described the police violence against protesters as an attack on the unity between Coptic and Muslim youth that materialized over the past couple of days. Activists from the April 6 Youth Movement, the Socialist Reform Front, and the Kefaya Movement for Change said they were planning an open strike in front of the High Judiciary Court that they stated will continue until all eight of the detainees are released. The same procedure of referring activists to urgent trials was “recently used by authorities against democracy activists Ahmed Doma (Justice and Freedom Movement – Cairo) and Hassan Mostafa (Hashd movement – Alexandria) both of whom received a prison sentence of one month,” El Nadim Center said. The trail is meant as harassment of the movement of solidarity that was “planning, with hundred others, to attend the Coptic Christmas Mass … and demanding the trial of those responsible for the Alexandria massacre: Minister of Interior Habib El-Adly, security director of Alexandria as well as demanding a unified law for places of prayer,” the center added.
