CAIRO: A military court decided Tuesday to drop a three-year prison sentence handed down to Maikel Nabil, who he will be retried in another district. While lawyers and Nabil's family demanded he be released until his retrial, a decision to release him had not been taken by the court until press time. The location of his retrial has also not yet been revealed. Nabil, who has been on a hunger strike for 50 days, was previously charged with insulting the armed forces and spreading false news for a blog her wrote titled "The army and the people are not one hand" last March. "We presented an official request to the court to release my son who has been on a hunger strike … his health condition is deteriorating and he has to be transferred immediately to the intensive care unit," Maikel's father Nabil Sanad told Daily News Egypt on Tuesday. "My son refused to attend the court session in protest of his military trial, in addition to his bad health condition that does not allow him to move out of the prison hospital," Sanad added. Lawyer from the Front to Defend Egypt's Protesters Ramy Ghanem told DNE that the defense team questioned the fact that Nabil wrote the blog post in the first place. "The fact that the blog post was written on his blog or his Facebook account does not prove that he is the one who wrote it," Ghanem said, adding that the prosecution did not present any evidence proving he wrote the blog post. "The only evidence presented by the prosecution was that Maikel Nabil has an internet connection at home. The prosecution did not prove that the post was written from his home connection's IP address," he added. The blog post in question gathers evidence of what is said to be violations by the army and the military police during and after the revolution, and recounts what Nabil calls “the army's conspiracy against the revolution.” Nabil decided to go on a hunger strike in protest of what he considers discrimination against him, after the ruling military council pardoned activists Asmaa Mahfouz and Loai Nagati for similar charges. Nabil was detained by military intelligence during the revolution and claimed in a complaint he filed to the Prosecutor General afterwards that he was tortured during his interrogation. Meanwhile, activist Sahar Maher who was arrested by military police in front of C28 last Tuesday at a solidarity demo for Nabil, was released and charges against her dropped. Maher was filming a scuffle between one of the protesters and a military soldier when she was arrested and interrogated by military prosecution and charged of filming in front of a no-photo military zone.
