Giza Criminal Court sentenced one police officer to seven years and five lower ranking officers to five years in prison on Monday for beating a man to death and fabricating a drug possession charge in 2011.
The convicts raided the house of Mohamed Ramadan in the town of al-Saff to search for drugs. When the victim objected and asked the officers to provide a search warrant, they beat him to death, according to prosecutors.
The officers are currently released on bail.
Prosecutors said Ibrahim Mahgoub, the chief convict, fabricated the drug possession for Ramadan as a pretext for the search, and that invesitigations rendered Ramadan innocent of the charge.
Police brutality was a driving force behind the 2011 uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.
Reports of police beatings and violence have been on the rise in recent months. The Interior Ministry has routinely dismissed the cases as "individual occurrences".
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
