Egyptian court sentences police commander to 10 years for deaths

CAIRO – A police commander was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison in connection with the deaths of 37 protesters who suffocated in a police van in the chaotic weeks after Egypt’s military-backed interim government took power.

The mid-August deaths were denounced by human rights groups as emblematic of the security establishment’s belief that it answered to no one.

Police Lt. Col. Amr Farouk received the 10-year sentence. Three other police officers convicted in the case received one-year suspended sentences.

Relatives of the victims and human rights groups pronounced themselves disappointed that the other officers essentially escaped unscathed.

“This verdict is unjust,” the father of one of the dead said as he wept outside the courthouse.

Lawyer and human rights activist Gamal Eid said the verdicts were the result of a “lopsided judicial system,” the Reuters news agency reported.

The victims died after they were picked up by police during protests by supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. Authorities initially claimed they were killed after having tried to seize police hostages or escape.

However, evidence indicated that they were held in the overcrowded van for hours in sweltering temperatures, and that tear gas was fired into the confined space, compounding the dangerous conditions.

Prosecutors later acknowledged that no more than 24 prisoners should have been put into the van that carried about 45 prisoners, leaving only a few surivors.

The deaths came amid a crackdown against Morsi’s followers that killed about 1,000 people, according to international human rights groups. A government-appointed commission this week put the death toll in the mid-August violence at more than 600.

The case comes against a backdrop of escalating accusations of police abuse in Egypt’s overflowing jails. The Associated Press, citing government officials, reported this week that about 1,600 people had been jailed during the nearly nine months since Morsi was toppled in a military-led coup – figures reminiscent of the era of Hosni Mubarak, the dictator toppled in 2011.

Many of those imprisoned are Islamist followers of Morsi, but the crackdown has widened to include secular activists, academics and journalists. Media advocacy groups and others have launched a campaign to win the freedom of three journalists for the international broadcaster Al Jazeera English who have been jailed since Dec. 29.

The government on Tuesday released a letter from interim President Adly Mansour to the parents of one of the imprisoned journalists, Australian Peter Greste. In it, Mansour said he was bound to respect the independence of the judiciary but promised to work for a “speedy resolution of the case.”

The interim government has declared Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization and has jailed many people with even a tangential connection with the group. The Al Jazeera journalists were accused of belonging to or supporting a terrorist organization, apparently on the basis of having covered protests by pro-Morsi protesters.

Rights groups have said that even well-documented police abuses of detainees have gone unpunished.

laura.king@latimes.com

Twitter: @laurakingLAT

Hassan is a special correspondent.