Twenty-two men, dressed in white and crowded into a cage in a Cairo court, on Sunday denied charges of plotting attacks in Egypt for Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, with some alleging torture by police.
As the trial began, the alleged members of the cell pleaded not guilty to charges of “conspiracy to murder, spying for a foreign organization with intent of conducting terrorist attacks and weapons possession.”
Some of the defendants said they had been tortured in police custody, with one man shouting to the judge: “If you don’t believe us, just look at our bodies.”
PHOTO: REUTERS
Four more accused are on the run and are being tried in abstentia, including alleged Lebanese mastermind Mohammed Qublan.
The accused include two Lebanese, five Palestinians and 19 Egyptians.
During the hearing one man shouted, “We are at your command Nasrallah,” in an apparent reference to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who admitted in April that one of the defendants, Lebanese Mohammed Yusuf Ahmed Mansur known as Sami Shihab, was a Hezbollah agent.
Nasrallah said Mansur was tasked with smuggling weapons to militants in the Gaza Strip.
Family members were barred from attending the hearing. Dozens of relatives stood outside the courtroom in the hope of getting a glimpse of the defendants they had not seen in months.
“We don’t know anything about him. We have not seen him or heard from him in over nine months,” said the mother of Ihab Abdel Hadi, 30, who was arrested at his home in the north Sinai town of El-Arish in December.
Ihab’s wife Dina, 20, wearing a long black gown and niqab slitted to reveal her wet eyes, prayed nearby as she carried her one-year-old son.
“He is innocent, totally innocent. He is not into politics. He is a simple builder who only cares about his family,” she said.
As the blue vans carrying the defendants rolled in amid a blare of sirens, female relatives began to wail.
“May God punish the punishers,” screamed one woman at the top of her voice.
“Show some mercy during Ramadan,” another shouted.
Munira al-Hanafi, the wife of defendant Mossad Abdel Rahman al-Sherif, said her husband had been living in Saudi Arabia for the past two years and only came back to Egypt in April, when he was arrested at the airport.
“If he were guilty, would he have come home in the middle of the storm?” she asked, standing next to Mossad’s two sisters who were carrying plastic bags filled with food and drink they hoped to pass on to their brother.
Authorities began arresting members of what has become known as the “Hezbollah cell” last year, accusing them of plotting attacks against Israeli tourists and on ships in the Suez Canal.
The arrests led to a war of words between Sunni Egypt and Hezbollah’s Shiite Iranian backers, with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit accusing Iran of using Hezbollah to gain a foothold in Egypt.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS