Egypt executes 17 prisoners including 80-year-old Quran teacher

17 Egyptian prisoners, including Sheikh Abdel Halim Gabreel, an 80-year-old Qur'an teacher, were executed yesterday, on fabricated charges in the case known in the media as the "Kerdasa massacre". Regime authorities carried out the death sentences at dawn in Wadi Al-Natrun Prison in complete secrecy and without prior notification to the families.

The 16 other prisoners that were executed were: Walid Saad Abu Omaira, Mohamed Rizk Abuel Soud, Ashraf Sayed Rizk, Ahmed Owes Hussein, Essam Abdel Moety, Ahmed Abdel Nabi, Badr Abdel Nabi, Qutb Sayed Qutb, Omar Mohamed El-Sayed, Izzat Al-Attar, Ali El-Sayed Kenawy, Abdullah Saeed, Mohamed Yousef Al-Seidi, Ahmed Abdel Salam, Arafat Abdel Latif, Mustafa El-Sayed El-Kerfesh.

All 17 men were convicted of killing 13 policemen during a 2013 attack on a police station in the Giza suburb of Kerdasa in 2013.

However serious questions marks were raised over their conviction. Arab Organisation for Human Rights UK (AOHR) confirmed that the identity of those who raided the police station in question remains unknown – the state has not presented any concrete evidence linking the men executed (or any of those charged) with the raid. Many of their testimonies were extracted under torture, and are therefore inadmissible, and that the first trial was quashed because of the state's use of torture.

The conviction of Gabreel in particular has raised serious concerns. Not only does the 80-year-old suffer from serious health conditions that would make it impossible for him to have taken part in a deadly raid, but eyewitnesses have also presented testimonies stating that he was not among those originally present near the Kerdasa police station on the day of the incident.

Moreover, the prosecution's witnesses denied signing on the written statements confirming Gabreel's participation in the events. Nevertheless, the court ignored these documents and decided to execute him, said AOHR detailing the background of his case. His lawyer said he never committed any criminal act throughout his life and that he suffers from psoriasis and cannot walk long distances, which makes it impossible for him to participate in any criminal operations.

The executions, which are part of a wider campaign of repression against all critics of the Egyptian regime, have been met with condemnation. "These executions in these blessed days indicate the extent to which this regime has reached in terms of criminality, recklessness, and defiance of all standards and values upon which societies are built," said Dr Maha Azzam, president of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council in a joint statement with the Egyptian People's Democratic Party.

Their statement called on the masses of Egyptians to continue peaceful resistance and employ methods of civil disobedience and revolution against the military coup led by President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

In a sign of the growing concern over rising authoritarianism in Egypt, last week a coalition of 14 of the leading human rights groups and NGOs, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, called on the US not to waive the human rights conditions that apply to the $1.3 billion aid package to Egypt.

Source: Middle East Monitor, Staff, April 27, 2021

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

Tennessee | Christa Pike’s lawyer says she has not regained consciousness since her failed execution

Christa Pike has remained unconscious and on a ventilator at a hospital in the four days since her failed execution in Tennessee, and her prognosis might not be known for days more, one of her lawyers said Sunday. Little has been released about Pike’s condition since Wednesday night’s execution attempt. She has since remained hospitalized under guard as doctors try to get the massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital out of her system. When asked whether she ever regained consciousness after the execution attempt, Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell, Pike’s lawyer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “Not that I am aware of.”

What Tennessee wants to do next to Christa Pike is beyond grim

Christa Pike, the woman who survived two execution attempts in Tennessee earlier this week, remains hospitalized in critical condition, where presumably medical staff is at work trying to keep her alive. If she wakes from the coma she had entered, Tennessee officials want to start anew to inject lethal drugs into her seemingly too-small veins to kill her and carry out the state death warrant. Pike also is being treated for “significant injuries to both arms” sustained when two lethal injections of pentobarbital failed to kill her. If she dies, there will be no need to try again. As we know by now, Tennessee tried to put Pike to death Wednesday night by lethal injection for a murder she committed when she was 18. She would have been the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.

Tennessee Woman Christa Pike Survives Lethal Injection, Ends Up in Hospital; Governor Halts Executions

Tennessee unable to carry out the execution by lethal injection of Christa Gail Pike Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death for a 1995 murder Wednesday, media witnesses said, after the lethal injection was halted for hours as courts considered a last-minute appeal of what would have been the state's 1st execution of a woman in at least 200 years. Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution for a killing she committed at age 18 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an appeals court ruling that stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start. Officials then attempted to go ahead with it as planned.

Florida executes Curtis Beasley

A 77-year-old man convicted of killing a woman with a hammer has become the 16th person executed this year in Florida A 77-year-old Florida man was put to death Tuesday for his conviction in a deadly hammer attack on a woman decades ago, becoming the 16th person executed to date this year in the nation’s busiest death chamber. Curtis Wilkie Beasley was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. following a lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was convicted of 1st-degree murder, robbery, and grand theft auto in the 1995 hammer attack on Carolyn Monfort at her home south of Orlando.

Indiana plans to proceed with execution after botched Tennessee attempt

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Florida | He executed death row prisoners. Then they came back to haunt him

Dunnellon, Florida—Every night, one of the men Ron McAndrew killed would sit at the foot of his bed and stare, blankly, into his tortured soul. He knew they were coming. He’d shift over in his sheets to make room. “They never said anything,” McAndrew recalls, his aged voice straining from the weight of the memory. “They just sat there and looked at me.” But their eyes would talk. They would ask, "How could you do such a thing?’” says McAndrew. “You always claimed to be a good person. And now you’re killing people.”

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Gov. Bill Lee does not plan to stop Christa Pike's execution. Pike, 50, is scheduled to be killed by lethal injection 10 a.m. Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene," Lee said in a statement released Sept. 28. Pike's attorneys lamented the news.

Singapore | Ministry of Home Affairs refutes claims that death penalty was discussed during visit by Israel's security ministry

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Philippines | President Marcos Grants Absolute Pardon to Mary Jane Veloso

President Marcos Confirms Decision to Grant Absolute Pardon to Mary Jane Veloso President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has signed an absolute pardon for Mary Jane Veloso after more than a decade. On Friday (September 25, 2026), the President confirmed the decision during a visit to Guiuan, Eastern Samar. According to him, the pardon was officially signed the previous day, marking a major development in the case.

Tennessee Supreme Court denies stay for death row inmate Christa Pike

(TNND) — As Tennessee prepares for a Sept. 30 execution, the Tennessee Supreme Court has denied death row inmate Christa Gail Pike’s request to stop it. The court rejected Pike’s challenge to the state’s lethal-injection protocol, finding that her thrombocytosis diagnosis, a condition involving elevated blood platelets, did not show the execution would violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

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