Judges turning to owning guns following attacks
CAIRO: Egyptian security forces have grown accustomed to being targeted by Islamist militants. Now some judges have been buying guns after a spate of attacks which suggest that they too are on the hit list.
Militants are estimated to have killed more than 600 soldiers and policemen since the army toppled President Mohamed Mursi in 2013. A new front against judges could spell trouble for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has only just managed to create a degree of stability in the country.
On Saturday, three judges were shot dead – the same day that a court in Cairo sought the death sentence against Mursi and 106 supporters of his now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
“The threat to judges is real. It is a message of intimidation,” said Adly Hussein, the former head of the Cairo criminal court.
Although the judiciary said it was independent of the government and military, some of Egypt’s judges have drawn accusations of blatant bias by handing down lengthy jail terms and mass death against Islamists.
While supportive of Sisi, Western governments have been critical of some court decisions over the past two years, and have condemned the death sentence against Mursi. “It is unjust and undermines confidence in the rule of law,” the US State Department said.
Islamist foes of Sisi reacted with considerably more fury.
sentences
“Getting rid of the military judges and killing them is a sharia duty,” Akram Kassab, a member Egyptian preacher Youssef al-Qaradawi’s International Union of Muslim Scholars, wrote on his Facebook page after the Mursi verdict.
Neither Qaradawi nor Kassab lives in Egypt, and such open dissent within the country would ensure many years in prison. – Reuters