[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

June 11




EGYPT:

Cancel Military Court Death Sentences----Convicted Civilians Alleged Torture, 
Forcible Disappearances


The case of 8 men who could face imminent execution following a military trial 
shows why Egyptian authorities should place a moratorium on the death penalty, 
Human Rights Watch said today.

The 8 civilians, 6 of whom are in custody, were sentenced to death on May 29, 
2016, after a trial on terrorism charges that denied them basic due process 
rights and relied on confessions that the defendants said were obtained under 
torture. If the Supreme Military Court for Appeals denies the defendants' 
appeal, the 6 men in custody could be executed as soon as Defense Minister 
Sedky Sobhi and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ratify their death sentences.

"Egyptian authorities have been using military trials to dodge the already 
threadbare due process protections in regular courts, and we fear these trials 
may become rubber stamps for the death penalty," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle 
East director at Human Rights Watch. "Military courts should never be used 
against civilians, and they should certainly not be allowed to condemn 
civilians to death."

Sobhi should cancel the death sentences and order military prosecutors to drop 
the case, and if there is evidence against the men or their co-defendants, 
Egypt's prosecutor general should charge them in a regular court, Human Rights 
Watch said.

Since 2013, military courts have sentenced at least 60 defendants to death in 
at least 10 cases. 6 of these sentences have been approved and carried out. 
While military courts have handed down far fewer death sentences than the 
hundreds issued by regular courts since 2013, they do not provide even the 
limited due process protections available in those courts. Egyptian authorities 
have tried more than 7,400 civilians in military courts since al-Sisi decreed a 
law in October 2014 that vastly expanded military court jurisdiction.

The 8 men were among 28 tried together on terrorism charges. Only 1 of the 28 
was a member of the military. The court sentenced 12 to life in prison, 6 to 15 
years, and acquitted 2.

Military prosecutors alleged that the men had supported or belonged to a group 
tied to the Muslim Brotherhood that obtained explosives and weapons and plotted 
to carry out surveillance and attacks on government and security officials.

Human Rights Watch reviewed the military prosecution's 20-page indictment, a 
149-page defense memo, and the 37-page military court verdict. Human Rights 
Watch also interviewed two defense lawyers, one defendant who was sentenced to 
death but lives outside Egypt, and relatives of 5 other defendants.

The relatives said that the authorities arrested the 5 men between May 28 and 
June 2, 2015, and did not provide information about their whereabouts for 
weeks. The families inquired in local police stations and sent telegrams to 
various government offices but received no response. Some learned of their 
relatives' whereabouts weeks later, when they received calls from people who 
saw the men in detention. The authorities did not officially acknowledge that 
the men were being accused of crimes until July 10, 2015, when some of the men 
appeared in a video released by the Defense Ministry that accused them of 
belonging to "the biggest terrorist cell threatening national security."

5 of the men told their relatives that interrogators had tortured them, 
including with beatings, electric shocks, and hanging in painful stress 
positions. 3 said they were then forced to read confessions written for them. 2 
told their relatives that the Defense Ministry's Military Intelligence and 
Reconnaissance Department had held them in Cairo's Nasr City neighborhood, in a 
facility that Human Rights Watch independently confirmed belonged to military 
intelligence. None of the men were allowed access to lawyers during their 
detention, interrogation, or initial questioning by military prosecutors.

The men's trial, known as Case 174 of 2015, began on September 17, 2015. 
Military prosecutors charged the defendants with manufacturing explosives, 
acquiring defense secrets, possessing firearms, and violating article 86 of the 
penal code - Egypt's primary anti-terrorism statute. The law provides for life 
imprisonment or the death penalty for anyone who helps lead a group that uses 
terrorism to "disrupt the provisions of the constitution or laws, prevent state 
institutions or public authorities from carrying out their work, assault 
citizens' personal freedoms or general rights, or harm national unity or social 
peace." Under article 86, anyone who supplies such a group with money, weapons, 
or explosives can also receive the death penalty.

The indictment Human Rights Watch reviewed relied entirely on the testimony of 
Major Hani Soltan, an officer with military intelligence Group 77. Soltan 
testified that on May 24, 2015, during a routine inspection of troops returning 
from leave, military personnel discovered a concealed camera pen in the 
possession of a conscript assigned to the Defense Ministry's general 
secretariat. After interrogating the man, Soltan testified, he was able to 
uncover the plot and identify the members of the "terrorist cell."

Prosecutors did not charge any of the 28 defendants with an act of violence but 
said the men were preparing for attacks by stockpiling weapons and conducting 
surveillance on security officials, including Gen. Medhat al-Menshawy, the head 
of the Interior Ministry's Central Security Forces, who commanded the brutal 
2013 dispersal of a mass sit-in in Cairo that left at least 817 protesters dead 
in one day.

In March and April 2017, Human Rights Watch sent letters to six Egyptian 
institutions including the presidency and Defense Ministry, expressing serious 
concerns about death sentences handed down in military courts and urging 
al-Sisi and Sobhi not to approve the death sentences in this case or another 
case in which 7 men were sentenced to death by a military court in connection 
with a deadly explosion at a stadium in Kafr al-Sheikh. Human Rights Watch also 
said that Egyptian authorities should place a moratorium on the death penalty 
in all regular and military courts in view of the sharp rise in the number of 
death sentences, turbulent political upheaval, and failure to pass a 
comprehensive transitional justice law in Egypt since the military removed the 
country's 1st freely elected president in July 2013.

In 2015, 6 men were executed following an unfair military trial in which they 
were accused of participating in attacks on security forces, including a 
gunfight that killed army officers. In that case, Human Rights Watch determined 
that three of the men could not have participated in the attacks because 
authorities had arrested them months earlier and they were in detention at the 
time. Nevertheless, they were sentenced to death and executed by hanging after 
Sobhi and al-Sisi ratified their sentences.

Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all circumstances as a 
punishment that is not only unique in its cruelty and finality, but also 
inevitably and universally plagued with arbitrariness, prejudice, and error.

Egypt's military courts violate several key elements of due process, including 
the defendants' right to be informed of the charges against them, to access a 
lawyer, to have a lawyer present during interrogations, and to be brought 
promptly before a judge. Judges in the military justice system are military 
officers subject to a chain of command, without the independence to ignore 
instructions by superiors.

The use of military courts to try civilians violates international law. The 
Human Rights Committee, the international expert body that interprets the 
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Egypt ratified in 
1982, has stated that civilians should be tried by military courts only under 
exceptional circumstances and only under conditions that genuinely afford full 
due process. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, which 
interprets the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, ratified by Egypt 
in 1984, has stated that civilians should never face military trial and that 
military courts should not have the power to impose the death penalty. The 
African Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Fair Trial and Legal 
Assistance, adopted in 2003, prohibit military trial of civilians under all 
circumstances.

The Case Against the 28 Men

According to the indictment in Case 174 of 2015, the investigation began when 
guards found a concealed camera pen and flash memory in the possession of Ahmed 
Magdi Nagi, a conscript assigned to the Defense Ministry general secretariat, 
during an inspection on May 24, 2015.

Major Soltan, the military intelligence officer, interrogated Nagi and said 
that Nagi told him a man named Khaled Ahmed al-Sagheer had recruited Nagi into 
a terrorist cell tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Sagheer met Nagi through 
Nagi's neighbor, Mohamed Hamdi, on May 19, and the 2 met again 4 days later, 
when al-Sagheer gave Nagi the camera pen and instructions for conducting 
surveillance on military officers and facilities.

Soltan testified that after arresting Nagi, he made Nagi contact al-Sagheer and 
arrange a meeting near the Qobba Bridge Hospital in Cairo's Nasr City district, 
where he promised to give al-Sagheer the camera pen containing photos of his 
surveillance. After obtaining permission from prosecutors, Soltan testified, he 
arrested al-Sagheer following the meeting and found him in possession of the 
pen and a 2nd camera concealed in a watch.

Afterward, Soltan said, al-Sagheer confessed to leading a group within the cell 
responsible for surveillance, and identified a man named Ahmed Amin Ghazali as 
the cell???s leader. Soltan instructed al-Sagheer to arrange a similar meeting 
with Ghazali in the nearby Qobba Gardens neighborhood and arrested Ghazali as 
well.

Through these arrests, Soltan testified, he was able identify 25 other people 
who had either been members of the cell's 3 groups - for surveillance, weapons 
manufacturing, and carrying out operations - or who had assisted the cell. 
Soltan testified that the cell had plotted to target General al-Shennawy, the 
Central Security Forces commander; army Gen. Mohamed al-Assar, the minister of 
military production; and Cairo University President Gaber Nassar.

According to military intelligence Group 77 inspection reports marked "secret" 
but included in the court files, intelligence officers seized 2 concealed 
camera pens, 2 flash memory drives, and a concealed camera watch. 1 camera pen 
contained "unimportant" photos and videos, while the other had 3 photos meant 
to "study and observe the objectives" and 4 videos "filmed in the streets 
possibly to observe the road to the target."

An inspection report prepared by crime scene investigators with the Interior 
Ministry's Public Security Agency, also included in the files, documented the 
seizure of numerous weapons from the home of one of the defendants, Abd 
al-Basir Abd al-Raouf, including 1 FAL and 1 Kalashnikov assault rifle, 2 types 
of shotguns, and 3 pistols. The report also stated that the authorities had 
seized a Kalashnikov assault rifle from Ghazali's home.

A military engineers' report included in the court files documented the 
controlled destruction of what the authorities alleged were homemade explosive 
devices and other equipment seized from some of the defendants. Defense lawyers 
told Human Rights Watch that military prosecutors did not present any of the 
seized weapons at trial, but that they also had not asked them to do so.

Soltan testified that 2 men living outside Egypt, Ahmed Abd al-Basit, a former 
Cairo University doctoral student, and Abdullah Nour al-Din, had founded and 
funded the cell. He also said that the group was involved in vandalizing police 
cars and electricity and telecommunications towers but gave no details about 
these operations or where, when, and how they were carried out. In May 2016, 
the military court sentenced Abd al-Basit, Nour al-Din, and Ghazali to death 
and sentenced Nagi and al-Sagheer to life in prison.

The relatives who spoke with Human Rights Watch said that only 2 of the 
defendants, Souhaib Sa'ad and Omar Ali, had known each other before the case. 
Military prosecutors did not charge Hamdi, the neighbor who allegedly 
introduced al-Sagheer to Nagi, and the presiding judge rejected the defense 
team's request to call Hamdi as a witness.

All 5 families said they had received no response to their telegrams to the 
prosecutor general inquiring about their relatives' whereabouts. Human Rights 
Watch examined several of the telegrams. In court, defense lawyers requested 
that the prosecution present official documents stating where the defendants 
had been held after they disappeared, but prosecutors refused. The presiding 
judge "was just like a silent watcher," said 1 relative, who was allowed to 
attend 3 court sessions because he is a lawyer. Military judges also did not 
respond to requests from defense lawyers to investigate the defendants' 
allegations of enforced disappearance and torture, nor did the judges allow the 
defendants to be examined by the Justice Ministry's Forensic Medical Authority, 
the lawyer said.

The families said they never received warrants from the police authorizing 
their relatives' arrests, either during the arrest or afterward.

Abd al-Basit, 1 of the cell's 2 alleged founders, is mentioned only once in the 
indictment, in a section that summarizes the confession of Ghazali, the cell's 
purported leader, and states that Ghazali admitted to receiving an unidentified 
amount of money from Abd al-Basit. The prosecution's file contains no evidence 
of this money transfer. Defense lawyers stated in court that all the defendants 
renounced their confessions and said they had been obtained under torture. Abd 
al-Basit, who was expelled from Cairo University in 2015 for organizing 
peaceful protests against the military's removal of former President Mohamed 
Morsy and human rights abuses by the security forces, and who lives abroad, 
told Human Rights Watch that he believed Ghazali had mentioned his name under 
torture because they knew each other from the university.

Disappearances

Ghazali, 27, disappeared on the night of May 28, 2015, his brother Ammar said. 
He said that a woman saw a group of men pull Ghazali into a car near the Maadi 
metro station in Cairo. When Ghazali resisted, his mobile phone fell under a 
car parked in the street. The woman picked up the phone after they left, called 
the last number dialed and reached Ghazali's family. She told them what she saw 
and that she was going to get rid of the phone because she did not want to get 
in trouble, Ghazali's brother said.

The next day, security forces in uniform and others wearing civilian clothes 
came to their home with Ghazali, who was blindfolded and handcuffed behind his 
back, said his brother, whose family was there at the time. The uniformed men 
broke into the apartment and searched it, saying they said they were looking 
for guns, but found nothing. They left and did not tell the family where they 
were taking Ghazali.

His brother said that the family visited every police station in the Maadi 
neighborhood, as well as other Interior Ministry facilities in Cairo, but none 
admitted to having any information about Ghazali. The family sent a telegram to 
the prosecutor general on May 30, but received no response. After seeing the 
Defense Ministry video on July 10, Ammar Ghazali visited military prosecutors, 
who told him to look for his brother in Cairo's Tora Prison compound. When 
Ammar went there, he discovered that the authorities were holding Ghazali in 
the "Scorpion" Maximum Security Prison inside the Tora compound.

Security forces arrested Mohamed Fawzy Abd al-Gawwad, 24, an electrical 
engineer who had recently graduated from Cairo University, on May 29, 2015, at 
his apartment in the Helwan neighborhood of Cairo, his father said. Several 
neighbors witnessed the arrest and called Abd al-Gawwad's father, who was 
traveling with his wife to visit family in another city.

The father said that when they returned hours later, they found that security 
forces had broken into their building, destroying the metal door downstairs and 
their apartment door. They had confiscated their son's laptop, mobile phone, 
and tablet, which the family received later during the trial. The father began 
inquiring about Abd al-Gawwad in local police stations, where officers denied 
knowing anything about him. The next day, the family sent a telegram inquiring 
about his whereabouts, a copy of which Human Rights Watch reviewed, to the 
prosecutor general, who did not respond.

On June 17, the father received a phone call from an unknown person who said 
that he had seen Abd al-Gawwad in Istikbal Prison inside Tora. When the father 
went to Tora, officers told him he could visit his son in 15 days.

Mahmoud al-Sherif Mahmoud, 30, a mechanical engineer, disappeared on June 1, 
2015, his father said. Though the father did not witness the arrest, Mahmoud 
told his father later that a group of men had taken him from the street close 
to Cairo's Helwan metro station. His father said that security forces - 
including police, Central Security Forces, and a man whom he believed was an 
intelligence officer in civilian clothes - came to search their home the day 
after Mahmoud's disappearance, without a warrant. The intelligence officer told 
his group to search the house without destroying any property.

"He was more polite than others," the father said.

The next day, the family sent a telegram inquiring about Mahmoud's whereabouts, 
which Human Rights Watch reviewed, to the prosecutor general but did not 
receive a response.

Like Abd al-Gawwad's family, Mahmoud's family received a call on June 17 from 
an unknown person who said he had seen Mahmoud in the Tora prisons compound.

On June 2, 2015, the day after Mahmoud's disappearance, police arrested Abd 
al-Basir Abd al-Raouf, 20, then a 1st-year student at the Maritime Academy, on 
the street near a department store in Helwan, his mother said. She said that he 
was studying for final exams at the time and had been going to a friend's house 
so they could study together. When his mother tried to call him several times 
the next day, his phone was off. Later that day, he called back and said he had 
finished the exam but would stay with his friend for a few days. There was no 
need to worry, he told her.

On June 7, after Abd al-Raouf did not call or return home, his mother sent a 
telegram to the prosecutor general saying that her son had disappeared, but she 
received no response. On June 15, a woman called the family and said that she 
had seen Abd al-Raouf while visiting her husband in Istikbal Prison inside Tora 
and that he wanted them to bring him clean white clothes instead of the 
prison's standard white uniform. Later, Abd al-Raouf told his mother that when 
he had called her on June 3 and claimed to be with his friend, he was actually 
in the custody of security officers, who allowed him to make only that call.

Abd al-Raouf told his mother that 2 men in civilian clothes had carried him 
into a civilian car and taken him to Helwan Police Station where they held him 
for a night before moving him to a place he could not identify. His mother said 
that a few days after her son's arrest, someone came and searched their home 
while the family was gone. When her other son went home to retrieve some 
belongings, he found that the door was broken and the apartment appeared to 
have been searched.

Notes made by the military prosecutor in the file reviewed by Human Rights 
Watch stated that prosecutors had ordered Abd al-Raouf arrested and detained 
pending investigation on June 3, but his father obtained a document from the 
Interior Ministry's Prison Administration Authority, which Human Rights Watch 
also reviewed, stating that Abd al-Raouf had not been in any of its prisons 
before June 13, the day when he and other defendants said they saw military 
prosecutors for the 1st time. The authorities were unable to account for the 10 
days in between, the period of Abd al-Raouf's forced disappearance.

Ahmed Mustafa Ahmed, 42, the owner of a small workshop who lived in Cairo's 
Manshiyat Nasr neighborhood with his wife and 4 children, disappeared around 
the end of May 2015, his brother, Walid, told Human Rights Watch. Walid Mustafa 
said that the family did not know his brother's whereabouts for several weeks, 
and that he sent telegrams to the prosecutor general and the Interior Ministry 
inquiring about his brother but did not receive a response.

Later, Ahmed Mustafa told his brother that security forces had taken him from 
his home, put him in his car, and made him drive to work. The building guard 
told Walid that the security forces had beaten his brother severely during the 
arrest. Police searched his workshop and destroyed many items, Walid Ahmed 
said. He said that the police had confiscated a large amount of money that 
Mustafa Ahmed had saved for his business and did not take anything else from 
the home or the workplace, except Mustafa Ahmed's car, which they did not 
return to the family.

Several weeks later, Walid Ahmed said, he was "surprised one day when an 
unknown man called me and said that my brother was in Tora Prison and that the 
1st visit would be in 11 days."

In June 2015, Human Rights Watch documented the enforced disappearance of Ali 
and Sa'ad, whom security forces arrested on June 1, 2015, along with a 3rd 
friend, Esraa al-Taweel, outside a restaurant in the Maadi neighborhood. 
Interior Ministry officials repeatedly denied arresting them, but more than 2 
weeks later, relatives found Sa'ad and Ali in Tora Prison and al-Taweel in 
al-Qanater Women's Prison. Prosecutors held al-Taweel in pretrial detention on 
accusations of belonging to a terrorist group, but after widespread public 
pressure, a court ordered her release 6 months later on medical grounds. 
Al-Taweel was not charged in case 174, but military prosecutors alleged that 
Sa'ad and Ali belonged to the cell???s surveillance group.

Most of the relatives who spoke with Human Rights Watch said that security 
forces kept the men blindfolded and stripped to their underwear during their 
entire time in custody, leaving them unable to identify their detention site. 
But relatives of Abd al-Raouf and Mahmoud said the men claimed they had been 
held in the Nasr City military intelligence headquarters. Human Rights Watch 
has independently confirmed that military intelligence Group 77, to which Major 
Soltan belonged, is located there.

Torture

The 5 families who spoke with Human Rights Watch alleged that security forces 
tortured their relatives while they were forcibly disappeared to make them sign 
dictated confessions and read them out loud while being videotaped. The 
Interior Ministry does not allow human rights groups to interview prisoners, 
and the military judges presiding over the case denied the defense team's 
request for the defendants to receive medical examinations, so Human Rights 
Watch was unable to independently confirm these accounts.

Abd al-Raouf's mother said that when she first saw her son, it was a "big 
shock," and that he appeared exhausted.

"I was crying and holding him and saying, 'What happened to you, what did they 
do to you, my son,'" she said. Abd al-Raouf pointed at Ali, she said, whose 
mother was visiting him, and indicated that Ali's wrist was almost broken. Abd 
al-Raouf told his mother "not to worry." During another visit, he told her that 
his interrogators beat him severely while he was blindfolded for 12 days and 
once kept him hanging from his wrists for 3 days.

Abd al-Raouf's father said that his son told him his interrogators shocked him 
with electricity and tortured him psychologically by driving him into the 
desert on 1 occasion and threatening to kill him. Abd al-Raouf's mother said he 
told her that his only desire during his detention was for the torture to stop. 
He told her that his interrogators eventually took him, blindfolded and 
handcuffed, to a man he was told was a military prosecutor.

The man asked Abd al-Raouf questions but wrote down fabricated answers without 
waiting for Abd al-Raouf to respond. He then asked Abd al-Raouf to sign a 
document. Abd al-Raouf's mother said he told her that at one point, when he 
denied the prosecutor's accusations that he had possessed weapons, someone hit 
him in the back with a gun and told him that nobody knew where he was and that 
they could make him "another Islam Atito." The man was referring to a student 
who disappeared from Ain Shams University in May 2015 and was later said by the 
Interior Ministry to have died in a shootout with security forces.

Abd al-Raouf's mother said that when he arrived at Istikbal Prison, the prison 
doctor, inspecting him and other detainees, refused to admit them without 
hospital reports documenting their injuries, but that the prison warden 
pressured him not to insist on this.

Ghazali's brother Ammar said that when the family saw him for the 1st time in 
prison, "he still didn't understand what was happening to him."

"He was tortured in many different ways: Hanging from hands and tying weights 
to his legs. When he was [let down] he got immense pain. [They hit him] with a 
piece of cloth soaked in a flammable liquid, and when he tried to sleep later 
he couldn't, because his back was so inflamed," his brother said.

The day before recording the confession video, the interrogators brought a 
paper to Ghazali and told him: "You will read what is written on it [in] order 
to get out of here, or you will stay with us," Ammar Ghazali said.

Abd al-Gawwad was held completely naked, his father said. "Anything you can 
think of happened to him. When he fainted, they used to wake him up and torture 
him again," he said. "He was beaten and humiliated verbally in all ways. When I 
saw him, he had dark skin on his hands and wounds from ties and hanging."

The father said that his son was forced to read his confession from a piece of 
paper while the interrogators videotaped him. He said that they recorded the 
confession about 10 times, until they obtained a recording that made it seem as 
if Abd al-Gawwad were speaking naturally and not reading. He said Abd al-Gawwad 
told him that he was so badly tortured he could not raise his arms or legs to 
put clothes on and that the interrogators had to dress him in a shirt and pants 
to be filmed.

Walid Ahmed, the brother of Mustafa Ahmed, said his brother told him that 
interrogators hanged him from his wrists, gave him electric shocks on his 
genitals, deprived him of sleep, and held him naked while pouring water on him. 
When Walid saw his brother for the 1st time, he seemed to have lost weight and 
have torture marks on his hands.

"He wasn't the brother I knew," Walid Ahmed said of his appearance. He said 
that when his brother tried to carry his 6-month-old daughter in 1 of the 
prison visits, his hands were shaking so severely that he nearly dropped her. 
He told his family that his interrogators beat him severely when he asked to 
remove his blindfold to identify a man his interrogators said was a prosecutor. 
The interrogators filmed his pre-written confession between 10 and 15 times 
because his eyes kept dropping down to read the confession paper, his brother 
said.

"I asked him how can you sign such confessions," Walid Ahmed said.

His brother responded: "I was dying ... I was going to die."

He also told his brother that the interrogators threatened to bring his wife 
and other family members and rape them if he did not confess.

Mahmoud's father said that Mahmoud told him that the worst torture was the 
threat to arrest his family. But Mahmoud also told his father the interrogators 
had dragged him on the floor, handcuffed his hands behind him and hanged him 
painfully from a door, beat him with hoses, and shocked him with electricity 
repeatedly. After Mahmoud's arrest, intelligence forces arrested 2 of his 
younger brothers separately, without charges, the father said.

He said that the older of the 2 arrested brothers, Moataz, disappeared for more 
than four months after the military unit in which he served as an unenlisted 
civilian laborer called him back from leave. The family only discovered his 
whereabouts after they submitted a special request to the commander of the air 
force. The father said that authorities took Moataz to a military intelligence 
office for a month and half and that intelligence officers brought him to see 
Mahmoud while both were in custody.

"When he saw Mahmoud, he was shocked, he thought he was burned, his face looked 
like it was burned," the father said. He said that officers tortured both 
brothers, including with beatings and cigarette burns. They then sent Moataz 
back to his unit, where he spent two and half months in custody and was later 
released after he was discharged without any compensation, his father said.

Several days after Mahmoud's disappearance, security forces raided their home 
for the 2nd time, at about 11 p.m., breaking the door and taking away Mahmoud's 
youngest brother, who had secondary school exams at that time.

"They threatened [Mahmoud] that they wouldn't allow his brother to take exams," 
his father said. Around dawn the next day, they released the brother. The 
father said that a man from the local police station called him on the phone 
and told him to come take his son, saying, "We don???t need him anymore." A few 
days later, they received a phone call from an unknown individual informing 
them that Mahmoud was being held in Tora Prison.

(source: Human Rights Watch)





GHANA:

'Major Mahama's killers must be executed by firing squad' - Retired soldier


A retired army officer is advocating death penalty for the killers of slain 
military officer, Major Maxwell Mahama.

Captain Budu Koomson (rdt) is convinced execution of the perpetrators will 
deter others from engaging in mob injustice.

52 suspects of which eight are women have been remanded in police custody 
following the gruesome murder of then Captain Maxwell Adam Mahama.

The late soldier was lynched by a group of people at Denkyira Obuasi in the 
Central Region where he was on official duty to combat illegal small-scale 
mining, popularly known as galamsey.

The angry mob mistook Major Mahama for an armed robber after a snail seller 
spotted a pistol on him when he was reaching for his pocket to pay for snails 
he had bought from her while jogging on Monday 29 May.

He was given a state burial on Friday June 9, 2017 at the forcourt of the State 
House in Accra.

Government has also promised a Trust Fund to help the family of the deceased 
with a seed fund of GHS500, 000 with President Akufo-Addo also pledging some 
GHS 50,000 from his personal coffers to the bereaved family.

But Captain Budu Koomson (rdt) in an interview on Adom News said the ceremony 
to honour the fallen soldier will be a faze if those involved don't face the 
full rigorous of the law.

"We've atoned ourselves; we've told God, Maxwell and ourselves that we are 
sorry so a swift investigations investigation of what happened, trial and the 
consequences applied.

"If they are found guilty, the extreme punishment allowed should be given and 
if the death penalty is still in our status books and they [suspects] qualify 
for death, let us execute them by firing squad.

This punishment, Captain Budu Koomson (rdt) stressed will send a shock wave for 
others to sit up.

(source: ghanaweb.com)






BANGLADESH:

No female prisoner executed in Bangladesh----Currently there are 37 convicted 
death row female prisoners. The only known execution of a woman in this region 
took place in 1937 in Sylhet


Since independence, Bangladesh has not carried out the death sentence of any 
woman convict, prisons officials say. Even if a woman is sentenced to death, 
her punishment is later commuted.

The latest example is Oishee Rahman, who killed her father, Special Branch 
inspector Mahfuzur Rahman, and mother Swapna Rahman on August 16, 2013 at their 
Malibagh residence.

A Dhaka court found her guilty in 2015 and handed down maximum penalty for the 
cold-blooded killing. But the High Court on June 5 revised the punishment to 
life imprisonment.

The court cited 5 reasons for commuting her sentence: lack of motive, medical 
report (on her physical and mental state), mental disorder, lack of prior 
criminal records and surrender within 2 days of committing the crime.

According to Prisons Headquarters, there are 75,935 prisoners at various jails 
as of June 7 - and 1,456 of them are death row convicts.

Altogether 2,899 women are behind bars - 2,369 of them are under trial while 
the 533 are serving various sentences. Only 37 of them are carrying death 
sentences.

There are 267 children below the age of 6 with the female prisoners and 
detainees.

Prisons sources say the only known execution of a woman in this region took 
place in 1937 in Sylhet, when one Karimunnesa was hanged for murdering her 
husband. Although many countries execute women prisoners, there is no such 
known incident in Bangladesh.

Assistant Inspector General of Prisons (administration) Md Abdullah Al-Mamun 
told the Bangla Tribune: "We have no information on executing female prisoners 
in Bangladesh. I am not aware of any such incident that might have taken place 
before the independence."

(source: Dhaka Tribune)






PAKISTAN:

Bahawalpur court hands down death sentence to man for blasphemous Facebook 
posts


A man was handed down the death penalty by an anti-terrorism court (ATC) in 
Bahawalpur on Friday over charges of committing blasphemy.

The Counter-Terrorism Department Multan had registered a case against Taimoor 
Raza over accusations of posting blasphemous material on Facebook.

He was arrested and presented before the ATC in Bahawalpur. During trial, he 
was found guilty of committing blasphemy and was sentenced to death.

On Wednesday, an ATC in Islamabad had dismissed the bail plea of a suspect who 
is facing charges of committing blasphemy through social media.

The petitioner, who is said to be a college professor, wrote in the bail 
application that he had no connection with spreading any blasphemous content 
through the social media. In the petition, he claimed that he was innocent and 
urged the court to grant his bail.

(source: The Express Tribune)