Daughter of slain prosecutor denies claiming men executed for father's murder were innocent
Ahram Online, , Wednesday 20 Feb 2019


The daughter of Egypt's late chief prosecutor Hisham Barakat, who was killed in a 2015 bomb attack, has denied claiming that those executed over the killing were innocent.

Barakat's daughter, Marwa, said on Wednesday afternoon that her official Facebook account had been hacked, hours after a post shared from her account said that those executed earlier on Wednesday had been unfairly convicted.

"Yesterday, my account was subjected to a systematic hacking by terrorist groups," Marwa posted in the early afternoon on Wednesday. A prosecutor herself, she said the action was meant to "deceive the public opinion and stir confusion."

Egyptian authorities executed nine men convicted over the killing of Barakat Wednesday morning.

The men were among a group of 28 defendants who were sentenced to death in the case in 2017.

During the trial, some of the defendants said they were forcibly disappeared and that confessions they had made were extracted under torture.

Later in the day, Marwa posted: "Thank God the execution of the treacherous terrorism that had extended to martyr Hisham Barakat was carried out."

Her account disappeared from the social networking website several times during the day. And the controversial post, which was shared hours before authorities announced the executions, has been removed. It read: "Those [men] are not the ones who killed my father, they will unjustly die…Save them and arrest the real killers."

The Judges Club, an influential body representing judges across Egypt, said in a statement that the "false" remarks were aimed at "stirring up confusion in public opinion… and casting doubt on the verdict against the terrorist killers."

Prosecutor-general Hisham Barakat was killed in a car bomb attack on his convoy in Cairo in June 2015.

Prosecutors have blamed the Muslim Brotherhood and militants from the Gaza-based group Hamas for the killing, but both groups denied the accusations.

Egyptian courts have issued hundreds of death sentences over terrorism-related charges in recent years, many of which have been overturned or reduced to prison terms; only a small number of these sentences have been carried out.

Earlier this month, authorities executed six people, three of whom convicted over the killing of a police officer in September 2013, and three others over the killing of a judge’s son the following year.

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