CAIRO: A Cairo Court adjourned the retrial of Al-Jazeera journalists to June 21, and ordered the arrest of student Sohaib Saad for not appearing at the Thursday hearing.
Canadian Journalist Mohamed Fahmy – YOUM7/Hassan Mohamed
Along with students in the same case known in the local media as the “Mariott Cell,” three journalists are facing charges of aiding a banned group, broadcasting false news to disrupt national security and operating without proper licenses.
Thursday session was scheduled to hear the defense of journalist Baher Mohamed. His lawyer, Mohamed Wahba, argued that the investigations upon which the arrest and inspection were ordered were “void,” and that there is “no evidence” for any of the charges drawn against his client.
Wahba said the bullet seized at Mohamed’s home was a “souvenir” from his work in Libya. The charge of “possessing of a single bullet” added three years to Mohamed’s initial prison term, unlike his two colleagues who received seven years in prison.
During the hearing, the judge also heard the closing defense by the lawyer of defendant Khaled Abdel Rahman.
By the end of the hearing, Mohamed said he was “comfortable” with his lawyer’s defense, and that he felt “annoyed” for linking him to his father’s affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. “It is really annoying to judge anybody by his father or his relative,” Mohamed told journalists outside the court.
The June 4 hearing witnessed the closing statements by defense of Canadian Journalist Mohamed Fahmy. During his own defense, Fahmy denied responsibility for invalid licenses of his former employer Al-Jazeera network. He previously said that the licenses charge could sentence them up to three years in prison.
A third Al-Jazeera journalist, Australian Peter Greste, was deported in February per a 2014 decree that allows non-Egyptians’ extradition to be tried or serve a sentence in their home country.
Fahmy has ceded his Egyptian citizenship in prison, before a court released them on bail, in order to make use of the deportation decree; however, he is still standing trial.
Baher Mohamed listens to one of lawyers during the trial – YOUM7/Hassan Mohamed
The three were sentenced in June 2014 to seven-ten years in prison; an appeal court abolished the sentence in January “due to lack of evidence” and ordered a retrial.