CAIRO // An Egyptian court sentenced deposed president Mohammed Morsi and more than 100 others to death on Saturday for their role in a mass jailbreak during the country’s 2011 uprising.
Hours after the ruling, gunmen shot dead two judges and a prosecutor in the restive Sinai Peninsula.
Sitting in a caged dock in a blue convict’s uniform, Mr Morsi raised his fists when the judge read out his verdict. He had already been sentenced to 20 years in prison for inciting violence.
The judge issued the death sentence to more than 100 other defendants including Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badei, who has also been handed the death penalty in another trial, and his deputy Khairat Al Shater.
Morsi was elected president in 2012 as the Brotherhood’s compromise candidate after Al Shater was disqualified. He ruled for only a year before mass protests prompted the military – then led by Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah El Sisi – to overthrow him in July 2013.
Morsi and dozens of other leaders were then detained amid a crackdown that left hundreds of his supporters dead.
Many of those sentenced on Saturday were tried in absentia, including prominent Islamic cleric Yusuf Al Qaradawi, who resides in Qatar.
Under Egyptian law, death sentences are passed on to the mufti, the government’s interpreter of Islamic law, who plays an advisory role. The defendants can appeal even after the mufti’s recommendation.
The court will announce its final decision on June 2.
“If he (Morsi) decides that we appeal against the verdict, then we will. If he continues to not recognise this court, then we won’t appeal,” said defence lawyer Abdel Moneim Abdel Maksoud.
Later on Saturday, gunmen in the Sinai shot dead two judges and a prosecutor in the North Sinai provincial capital of El Arish, as they were travelling by car to a court hearing.
It was the first attack to target the judiciary in the Sinai Peninsula, where security forces are battling an insurgency spearheaded by an ISIL affiliate named Sinai Province.
The shooting also killed the driver of the car that the judicial officials were travelling in and wounded another prosecutor.
Following the attack, Egypt’s interior ministry put police on high alert across the country and suspended all leave.
Some of Morsi’s fellow defendants included militants from the Sinai, where extremists have regularly carried out attacks against policemen and soldiers.
Morsi, 64, was spared the death sentence in the first of two trials that concluded on Saturday, in which the court advised death sentences for 16 defendants convicted of espionage.
They had been found guilty of colluding with foreign powers – in this case, Hamas and Iran – to destabilise Egypt.
The court will announce verdicts for Morsi and the remaining 18 defendants in that trial on June 2.
The verdict for the other case was then delivered, in which Morsi and 128 defendants were accused of plotting jail breaks and attacks on police during the uprising that overthrew president Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
More than 100 of them were sentenced to death, along with Morsi.
Many of the defendants are Palestinians alleged to have worked with Hamas in neighbouring Gaza. They were tried in absentia along with a Lebanese Hizbollah commander.
They were alleged to have colluded with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood to carry out attacks in Egypt in what prosecutors allege was a vast conspiracy.
Morsi was in prison when the anti-Mubarak uprising started on January 25, having been rounded up with other Brotherhood leaders a few days earlier.
On January 28 protesters torched police stations across Egypt, prompting thousands of prisoners to escape when the police force all but collapsed.
Mr El Sisi has pledged to eradicate the Brotherhood, once the largest political movement in the country.
* Agence France-Presse