Thabet, the chairman of the country’s biggest dairy and juice producer Juhayna Food Industries, and his son Seif El-Din were released mid-January after spending nearly two years in pretrial detention.
Thabet has been kept in pretrial detention since December 2020 for allegedly joining a terrorist group in case 865/2020. Seif El-Din, deputy chairman of Juhayna, was then arrested in the same case in February 2021.
The business tycoon and his son faced charges of joining and financing a terrorist group to help it change the regime by force. They were also accused of aiding and abetting assaults against the army and police personnel and their institutions and of harming the economy.
Thabet, who is an engineer and served as the chairman of the Chamber of Food Industries at Federation of Egyptian Industries, was added to the terrorism list in April 2018 for a five-year term, a decision that was scheduled to expire in April 2023.
Under Egypt's anti-terrorism law, which has been in effect since 2015, a person on the terror list is banned from travel and is liable to have their assets frozen.
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