A MILITARY court in Egypt sentenced five Islamist militants to death and 13 more to between five years and life in prison yesterday, as the government continued its crackdown. Two other defendants were acquitted by the judge, Brig Faisal Heyba, in the second such trial this month.
After the death sentences were pronounced the white clad defendants, members of Egypt's largest militant organisation, the Gamaa al Islamiya, wept and embraced one another as they shouted at their guards and chanted Islamist slogans.
The group was charged with bombing a busload of Austrian tourists and attacking a Cairo cinema in 1993. Earlier this month death sentences on five other militants were ratified and 19 received lengthy jail terms.
Yesterday's sentences came one day after police rounded up 45 suspected members of the shadowy Qutbioun group, which was virtually unknown until last December, when police announced the arrest of 200 members.
The Qutbioun is named after Sayed Qutb, a radical Islamist thinker and member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, who was executed by then president Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s.
Little is known about the group but some experts on Egyptian Islamists believe it could represent a new trend reviving the ideology of El Takfir, whose members believed that violence against society and the state was justified because both consisted of unbelievers.
Militant Islam has dogged successive Egyptian regimes since the second World War. The present government has been involved in a bloody battle with the Gama'a al Islamiya since the organisation began its campaign to overthrow the government in 1992. More than a thousand people have died in the violence, which peaked in 1993-94.