"Whatever they had decided we just wanted the verdict today," said Essex resident Abidah Nawaz, whose son Maajid, 26, is one of the three accused Britons. "Being in limbo like this is very frustrating." Standing trial with Maajid are London natives Reza Pankhurst, 28, and Ian Nisbet, 29, in addition to 23 Egyptians. The defendants were allegedly working to revive Hizb Al Tahrir, a movement banned in Egypt but legal in England. They face a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
Many of the defendants waved Qurans as they were lead out of the courtroom. Nisbet waved a handwritten sign that read in Arabic, "They are making all Muslims criminals." The wife of one of the Egyptian defendants wailed, as Egyptian women customarily do at funerals. Lawyers for the defendants called the repeated and lengthy delays very unusual. "It must mean that the three judges have not agreed on a verdict," said Ahmad Seif, one of the lead defense attorneys.
The 26 defendants are being tried in a State Security Emergency Court, established in 1981 when a state of emergency was declared following the assassination of then-President Anwar Sadat. These courts are widely criticized by human rights groups and opposition parties as unconstitutional. Their verdicts cannot be appealed.
After their arrest in April 2002, the defendants alleged that they were tortured while in custody and forced to sign confessions in Arabic that they could not read. Reza, one of the defendants, inserted the word "lies" into his signed confession to indicate that it was extracted under duress. "For four days we were beaten, electrocuted, threatened with sexual abuse, and deprived of sleep," said Nisbet, from a metal cage in the courtroom. The day before the expected verdict, at a demonstration a few blocks away from the courthouse, demonstrators assembled to demand political reform, shouting "We don't want torture in prisons." Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released reports critical of Egypt's record of torturing detainees.
The British government came under fire from the defendants and their families for failing to exert enough pressure on Egypt. But while the British Consul in Cairo, Gordon Brown, was expressing his disappointment with the delay of the verdict and his concern over the allegations of torture, Prime Minister Tony Blair was vacationing in Sharm Al Sheikh for the third consecutive year. "We feel very angry about the fact that Tony Blair is here," said Zara Pankhurst, mother of Reza. "While he's holidaying in Egypt, his own subjects, his own people, are being mistreated by the Egyptian government."
Periodic crackdowns against Islamists in Egypt are routine. Normally, however, detainees are held for a few months and released without trial. That this case has gone to trial is unusual, according to Montasser Al Zayat, one of the lawyers for the accused. Al Zayat suspects that Egypt is using the case to pressure the British government to hand over Yasser Al Sirri, who was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian military court in 1994, but was granted asylum in London. "Cairo is telling London you have Egyptian opposition figures that you won't give to us, and now we have people too," Al Zayat said.
Defense lawyers for the accused said their case might have been damaged when a group of worshippers allegedly belonging to Hizb Al Tahrir attacked Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher during his visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 23rd December. In the wake of that attack, the government rounded up dozens of suspected Hizb Al Tahrir members.
Hizb Al Tahrir was founded in Palestine in 1953. In the early 1970s, a Palestinian, Salah Sarreyah, established a branch of the organization in Cairo. Sarreyah was executed in 1975 after a failed attempt to occupy Egypt's Technical Military College. Today Hizb Al Tahrir opposes violence. The group's stated aims are to establish an Islamic state by peaceful means and it is legal in England. Though the three Britons standing trial are all admitted members of the organization in England, they say they had come to Egypt for unrelated reasons. Nawaz is a student of British law and Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He had come to Egypt to complete a compulsory year abroad. The other two are income tax consultants who came to Egypt to learn Arabic. All three are married and have young children. According to their families, the three have managed to keep their morale high while in prison, finding strength in their faith. After learning that the verdict would be delayed for another three months, Nisbet even joked that the added time in a jail would be good for his Arabic studies.
