GRi in Court International 20 - 11 - 2000
Egyptian military court jails 15 Islamists
Court frees
Nigeria militia leader of murder
Four before tribunal for political violence
Egyptian military court jails 15 Islamists
Heikstep (Egypt) 20 November 2000
An Egyptian military court handed down jail sentences of up to five years to 15 members of the outlawed fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood on Sunday, court sources said.
Three defendants received five-year terms and 12 were sent to prison for three years on charges of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and trying to penetrate professional unions. Five men were found innocent.
"The defendants have tried to revive the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and to recruit students and pupils to support the group after they become syndicate (union) members," said the judge in the trial at Heikstep military base, 20 km (12 miles) northeast of Cairo.
The defendants, arrested on October 16, 1999, are leading members of unions, which became a stronghold of Muslim Brotherhood influence in the late 1980s.
Among them are Mokhtar Noah, a legislator and member of the lawyers' union council, and Mohammed Bishr, a well-known engineering professor and former secretary-general of the engineers' union. Both were jailed for three years.
Political analysts have said the trial was a warning to the Brotherhood to keep out of future union elections. The government has prevented elections in the engineers' and lawyers' unions since 1993.
"Unfortunately, these verdicts are a political reaction to (our) election success," Essam al-Erian, a leading Brotherhood member and former legislator, told Reuters.
He was referring to the victory of 17 Brotherhood-backed candidates in recent elections for Egypt's 454-seat parliament. Brotherhood members complained of violations and harassment by security authorities during the polling.
Verdicts by military courts cannot be challenged. The president either upholds them or refers the case back to court.
Amnesty International has called for the release of the men, saying their detention and trial by a military court violated their human rights.
The Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928, was banned in 1954 after an alleged attempt by its members to kill then President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Since then it has enjoyed varying degrees of official tolerance.
It advocates turning Egypt into a strict Muslim state by political means, setting itself apart from militant groups that took up arms in 1992 in a violent campaign which killed about 1,200 people, most of them militants and police.
Egypt's secular government accuses the group of being a front for militant groups, whose violence has abated since 1997 after a tough government crackdown.
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Court frees
Nigeria militia leader of murder
Lagos (Nigeria) 20 November 2000
A Nigerian court has dropped
charges of murder brought against a tribal militia leader after the bloody
ethnic clashes that rocked the commercial capital Lagos last month, his lawyers
said on Saturday.
It was the third time Frederick
Fasehun, leader of the ethnic-Yoruba Oodua People's Congress (OPC), had gained
a judicial reprieve, following his arrest and prosecution by the police in
connection with the clashes in which more than 100 people were killed.
His lawyer, Femi Falana, told
Reuters the Lagos court freed Fasehun on Friday after the police failed to
substantiate the charges against him.
"The court discharged and
acquitted him based on the case file brought by the police, which did not
implicate him in the fighting, nor was there any evidence linking him,"
Fasehun was first granted bail by
the court last Monday after police arraigned him and four other members of the
OPC for murder.
But the militia leader was
re-arrested by the police shortly afterwards and charged on Wednesday in the
Ilorin district court in central Kwara State with criminal conspiracy and
public disturbance.
The Ilorin court also granted him
bail and fixed further hearing of the case for December 18.
The court victories seem to have
revived the voice of the OPC, which had been muffled following a police
clampdown after President Olusegun Obasanjo outlawed it and other tribal
militia groups in the wake of the Lagos mayhem.
Nigerian newspapers on Saturday
quoted Fasehun as saying after Friday's court judgement that no one could ban
his group.
"Nobody can kill OPC, OPC
cannot die," he said.
His lawyer told Reuters the
government had erred by banning the group, an action he said was reminiscent of
Nigeria's brutal military era.
"This is a democratic
setting, you can't just wake up one day and say you ban an association,"
Falana said.
But Lagos Police Commissioner Mike Okiro said the court victories
notwithstanding, "The government
has banned the group, and it remained banned."
The OPC emerged in the mid-1990s
as a military opposition group, but later metamorphosed into a campaigner for
autonomy for the southwestern Yorubas.
OPC has since been blamed by the
police for the series of ethnic clashes particularly in southwest Nigeria,
where hundreds of people have been killed.
Tamale (Northern Region) 20 November 2000
Four people appeared before the Tamale Circuit Tribunal on Friday charged for causing harm during a political clash between the NDC and NPP at Bimbilla.
The four, Alhassan Natogmah, Dawuda Natogmah, Azumah Natogmah and Dawundira Natogmah, pleaded not guilty and were each grant a two- million cedi bail.
The Tribunal heard that on November 2, this year, the two parties held rallies at different spots at Bimbilla, which went beyond the six o'clock limit for rallies.
The police stopped the rallies but the NPP supporters were not pleased and suspected the District Chief Executive (DCE) had ordered it.
On their way from the rally grounds, they met supporters of the NDC including the Bimbilla District Chief Executive and started chasing and throwing stones at them.
In the process Alhassan Natogmah and Dawundira Natogmah attacked Iddi Abu Mumuni with clubs injuring him on the right ear, but was rescued and sent to the Bimbilla Health Post where he was treated and discharged.
The Prosecution said Dawundira and Alhassan Natogmah were joined by Azumah Natogmah to attack Shamuna Huudu, the complaint, who saw his brother attacked and went to his aid. The case has been adjourned to November 23.
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