The names of the 26 Islamist convicts that were pardoned by President Mohamed Morsy on the occasion of Ramadan were published by the official state newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette, on Tuesday.
Among those listed were eight prisoners associated with the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood and 16 leading members of the formerly illegal Islamic Jihad and Jama’a al-Islamiya groups.
Also pardoned were a number of individuals who were sentenced in absentia, including Wagdy Ghoneim, who lives in Qatar; the Saudi preacher Awad al-Karni; Ibrahim Mounir, a Brotherhood leader who lives in London; Youssef Nada, the former foreign relations commissioner for the Brotherhood; Ibrahim Farouk; Mohamed al-Zayat, a Brotherhood businessman who lives in Germany; Brotherhood leader Tawfik al-Raie; the now deceased preacher Fathi Ahmed al-Kholi; and the Syrian engineer Ali Ghalib Mahmoud Hamt.
Morsy reduced Shaaban Abdel Ghani Haridi’s death sentence to 15 years in jail. Jama'a al-Islamiya lawyer Ibrahim Ali said that Haridi has therefore served his time and will be released from prison in a few hours.
Jama'a al-Islamiya and Islamic Jihad asked Morsy to pardon the rest of their 24 convicts currently held in Akrab prison, where they are serving sentences ranging from the death penalty to life imprisonment, on the grounds that their cases are similar with those who were pardoned.
Islamist lawyer Nizar Ghorab said that among the pardoned are two or three individuals who had been found guilty of involvement in the assassination of the late President Anwar Sadat in 1981 during a military parade in Cairo.
Since the toppling of former President Hosni Mubarak, several prominent Islamic figures have been released from jails, including Tarek al-Zomor and his cousin, the former head of Islamic Jihad Aboud al-Zomor, both of whom are also leading figures in the formerly illegal Jama'a al-Islamiya.
In 1982 both Tarek and Aboud were convicted on charges related to Sadat’s assassination. In March 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ordered their release along with other political prisoners who had already served 15 years or more of their jail terms.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
