Egypt Sentences 54 Top Islamic Activists : Mideast: Action is a decisive blow to banned Muslim Brotherhood. Charges include holding illegal meetings.

The government Thursday dealt a decisive blow to Egypt’s largest and most influential Islamic group when a military court jailed 54 Muslim Brotherhood leaders for three to five years.

The court, meeting at an army camp in the desert northeast of the capital, also ordered the Cairo headquarters of the organization closed and all its contents seized.

Police went into action immediately, turning out spokesman Mamoun Hodeibi, 86, and confiscating the group’s fax machine.

The 54 men include prominent academics, doctors and community leaders. They were accused of nonviolent offenses such as organizing an illegal group, holding illegal secret meetings and preparing anti-government leaflets.

The military court sentenced five of the 81 men in the case to five years of hard labor, 40 to three years of hard labor and nine to three years in prison. It acquitted 27.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned, says it is committed to setting up an Islamic state by peaceful means. It has tried but failed to register as a political party.

The Brotherhood has charged that the aim of the trial was to prevent the defendants from taking part in next week’s parliamentary elections. But the government has tried to link the defendants with violent Islamist groups fighting security forces.

The human rights organization Amnesty International this week described the 81 as prisoners of conscience and urged authorities to set them free. It said they are civilians who should not face military trial.

The Egyptian authorities had previously used the military courts only to try Muslim militants accused of acts of violence, arguing that the ordinary courts are too slow.

The defendants, arraigned inside a large cage, responded to the sentences by chanting Islamist slogans: “God is great, praise be to God. We look only to God, the best protector.”

Mohammed Khairat, a computer specialist sentenced to five years of hard labor, told reporters that prison will not change the defendants.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is like steel,” he said. “Islam is the only solution, the only hope against the corruption and injustice of President Hosni Mubarak.”

Salah Abdelmaqsoud, one of the 27 acquitted, said: “It’s purely political. There is no criminal act and no witnesses, and the only aim is to suppress the Islamist trend.”

Outside the camp, hundreds of relatives and sympathizers had gathered, but few were able to attend. At one point they tried to break through army barriers, but soldiers forced them back.

Diplomats in Cairo said the sentences constitute a serious blow to the group’s national organization.

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Those sentenced to five years include two of the most prominent men in the trial: Essam Eryan, assistant secretary general of the Egyptian doctors association, and Mohammed Habib, a science professor at Assiut University.

For years the government had turned a blind eye to the activities of the Brotherhood, but a year ago it began to turn against it on the grounds that members were giving clandestine support to the militant Gamaa al Islamiya (Islamic Group).

The Gamaa has been fighting a low-intensity guerrilla war against the police since 1992 in an attempt to overthrow the government and set up a strict Islamic state. More than 870 people have since been killed in political violence.