Egypt's military judiciary on Tuesday accepted an appeal by Mohamed al-Zawahiri against an earlier verdict issued in 1998, sentencing him to death on charges of terrorism, sources said. Zawahiri is the brother of newly-appointed Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The sources added that Zawahiri will appear before the Supreme Military Court.
Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) released Zawahiri in March, as part of a concerted effort to free Islamist prisoners detained over political cases in past years. Zawahiri has been detained since 1999.
Zawairi was then arrested again three days later. Security authorities discovered, after his intial release, he was sentenced to death in absentia in 1998 in a case publicly known as "Albania returnees."
The name refers to Islamist hardliners who joined Muslim resistance in the Balkan region against Soviet occupiers. The flow of jihadist fighters to the area started with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Some of them returned to Egypt, while others went to fight in Albania and other Balkan fronts.
Egyptian authorities had charged the returnees with plotting a coup, murdering civilians, and targeting tourists and Christians.
