Daily Star - Egyptian court sentences members of Hizbullah cell to prison - April 29,2010

Egyptian court sentences members of 'Hizbullah cell' to prison




CAIRO: An Egyptian court handed down jail sentences on Wednesday to 26 defendants it convicted of working for Hizbullah in a trial that highlighted difficult relations with the Lebanese group.
The 22 accused who were in the dock received jail terms of between six months and 15 years, despite calls from prosecutors for the death penalty.
Three of the four defendants still on the run, including the alleged head of the Hizbullah cell, Lebanese Mohammad Qabalan, received life sentences. The fourth received a lesser prison term, lawyers said.
The 26 were convicted of plotting attacks against ships in the Suez Canal and on tourist sites, among other charges. Most were detained between late 2008 and January 2009.
The defendants had said in a hand-written letter obtained by AFP that they never planned attacks in Egypt but sought to help the Islamist Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip, who have close ties with Hizbullah.
Hizbullah declined to comment on the verdict.
But in a statement aired on the group’s Al-Manar television, Emile Rahme, the Lebanese lawyer for one of the defendants, Sami Shehab, denounced the verdict as a “political” ruling from Egypt’s courts and criticized the sentences as “harsh and unjust.” Shehab was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah admitted after the arrests were publicized in April that he sent a senior commander, Mohammad Yusef Mansur, alias Sami Shehab, to Egypt to support Palestinian militants in Gaza.
He said the cell comprised no more than 10 people and denied they planned attacks in Egypt.
But Judge Adel Abdel-Salam Gomaa rejected the defense case, ruling that the defendants were not just supporting Hamas but had indeed intended to carry out attacks on Egyptian soil.
“Is targeting ships in the Canal support for the Palestinian cause? Is preparing explosives and targeting tourist resorts support for the Palestinians?” the judge asked.
During the trial, prosecutors displayed explosives, including suicide belts, they said police had seized from the defendants.
Lawyers for Mansur acknowledged that he had proposed carrying out attacks against Israeli targets in Egypt in retaliation for the February 2008 assassination in Damascus of Hizbullah military commander Imad Mughniyeh but said the idea had been rejected by the movement’s leadership.
Defense lawyers said Mansur admitted to training recruits to carry out attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
An Egyptian newspaper published a transcript of the prosecution’s interrogation of Shehab in which he said Qabalan trained two men from Gaza on using explosives before helping them enter Israel.
Mansur said the two were arrested in Israel in September 2008. A security official told AFP the transcript was accurate.
Mansur himself told AFP during a trial break that he and the other defendants had been tortured into confessing, an accusation denied by police.
After the verdict, defense lawyer Abdelmoneim Abdel-Maqsud challenged the legitimacy of the court, a tribunal of exception established under Egypt’s three-decade-old state of emergency.
“This is a political trial that was taken to a court that offered no guarantee of justice,” he said.
The defendants greeted the verdict with cries of “Allahu Akbar (God is Greater)” but the brave face was not shared by relatives, who had gathered outside the court building. Other relatives cried in shock.
The trial reignited a war of words between Egypt, Hizbullah and its Iranian backers.
Egypt, which has no formal diplomatic ties with Iran, accuses Tehran of backing the plot.
Iran and Hizbullah insist that Egypt contrived the case against the men.
Egypt responded angrily to a speech by Nasrallah calling on Egyptians to protest, and army officers to resign, over the government’s refusal to permanently open its crossing with Gaza during a devastating war between Israel and Hamas at the turn of 2009. – AFP, with AP