The Cairo Criminal State Security Court of Emergency sentenced in absentia four Muslim Brotherhood members to five years’ hard labor, in a Saturday afternoon session headed by Judge Mahmoud Samy Kamel.
The court sentenced a fifth defendant, Osama Soliman, a doctor and chairperson of the board of directors of Al-Sabah Company, to three years’ imprisonment. The five were convicted of money laundering and financing a group prohibited by law.
Defendants sentenced to five years are: Ashraf Abdel Ghaffar, a doctor and deputy secretary general of the Egyptian Medical Association; Wagdy Abdel Hamid Ghoneim, an Islamic cleric; Awad Muhammad al-Qarany, a Saudi citizen; and Ibrahim Monier Mustafa, an businessman.
The court initiated the session by listening to the lawyer Abdel Gawad Ahmed Abdel Hamid in place of Yasser Gaber Kashlag, a Syrian witness for the defense, who the lawyer said could not attend the session. He said the witness authorized him to answer the court's questions concerning the issue.
The called on the court to refrain from confiscating his clients money, the subject of the indictment, that his client purportedly sent Soliman to invest in Egyptian real estate. Pointing out that the transferred funds constitute profits from projects carried out in Syria, the lawyer submitted to the court a copy of his company’s commercial register. In support of the claim that the money was intended for investment in Egyptian real estate, he provided documents proving the existence of negotiations concerning the establishment of a real estate project on the Cairo-Alexandria desert road. The Syrian client was to be offered the opportunity to purchase the land chosen for the construction project, he claimed.
Stressing that his client has nothing to do with the case, the lawyer added that documents submitted to the court indicate that a member of the Qatar royal family is a business partner of his Syrian client and pointed out that an Egyptian real estate company, Tamima, constituted another other party in the contracting process.
He said that remittances from his client to Soliman's account at the International Arab Bank reached Egypt via the International Group for Exchange, a Syrian exchange company not connected to his client.
Selim al-Awa, leading Soliman’s defense team, said that the Syrian witness’s testimony counters attempts to link his client with any of the other four defendants. Demanding that his client therefore be discharged of the alleged accusations, he said that the testimony disproves accusations that he helped to finance the Brotherhood.
