Lawyers representing the victims of the Maspero massacre in October last year say the military court is hampering their work and does not provide the necessary guarantees of a fair trial.
On Sunday, a military court adjourned to 29 January the trial of three soldiers accused of involuntary manslaughter outside the Maspero TV building in Cairo last October. When the trial resumes, the court will respond to requests from lawyers for the inclusion of key witnesses and crucial evidence that have so far been missing.
The case against Mahmoud Suleiman and Karam Hamed, both 21 years old, and Mahmoud Taha, 22, began in December. All three of the accused are soldiers with the Central Military Command, which is headed by General Hassan al-Ruweiny, and are alleged to have killed protesters by running into them with armored vehicles.
Ahmed Hossam, a lawyer with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) attended Sunday’s court session as a legal representative for Vivian Magdy, whose fiancé Michael Mosaad, was among the 27 protesters killed on 9 October 2011, when army troops violently attacked a Christian protest march.
According to EIPR, the trial is being hampered by the failure of the military court to take into account evidence previously gathered on the case, including video evidence and witness statements, as well as the failure of the court to recognize the official standing of the rights group in the case.
As a result of this last failure, EIPR lawyers are only allowed to submit requests to the Military Prosecutor, who then passes them on to the court.
Hossam explained that EIPR filed three requests with the court via the Military Prosecutor on Sunday. The first was that investigations undertaken by the Military Prosecutor immediately after the Maspero incident, including witness statements, be included in the case. Secondly, EIPR requested the inclusion of video footage from the night of 9 October as evidence. Finally, a request was put forward that prosecution witnesses be allowed to give their testimony to the court.
The court will respond to these requests when the court reconvenes at the end of January.
EIPR has been highly critical of the Military Prosecutor’s decision to charge the three junior soldiers in connection with the events at Maspero, alleging that they are being used as scapegoats in order to shield more senior officers from responsibility. They claim also that the trial is an attempt to lend credibility to the version of events put forward by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
Quoted in a statement published on 26 December 2011, EIPR Director Hossam Bahgat said, "And why did the military judiciary choose to rush through this trial without waiting for the report of the investigative judge on the massacre? How can we trust the military judge when we see him expending all this effort in protecting soldiers and leaders from real accountability?”
EIPR is also critical of the charges themselves. According to the charge sheet described in the EIPR statement, the three soldiers are accused of causing the deaths of 14 people taking part in an “illegal assembly” through “negligence and absence of caution, while they were driving Armed Forces armored personnel carriers (APCs) in an arbitrary fashion… leading to their striking the victims.”
The charges carry a maximum sentence of seven years imprisonment.
Witnesses at the scene describe seeing three APCs being driven erratically and at high speed through the crowd of protesters and deliberately swerving into them, before circling underneath the 6 October Bridge next to the state radio and television building at Maspero, and again driving into terrified protesters.
This, they say, contradicts the SCAF’s claims that soldiers drove erratically because they panicked and were attempting to escape protesters attacking them.
In the same December statement, Bahgat said: “How can we consider the killing of 14 citizens manslaughter? And what of Mina Daniel and the rest of the massacre’s martyrs who were killed by live fire?”
With additional reporting by Abdel-Rahman Hussein
