Controversial Egyptian Chief Judge Dies of Cancer
An Egyptian judge infamous for sentencing hundreds of people to death following the 2013 military coup which brought current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to power, has died.
He was aged 72.
Shaaban al-Shami, the former chief judge of the Cairo Criminal Court, was pronounced dead on Sunday following a battle with cancer.
Among those he sentenced was Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi.
.Al-Shami was one of the most prominent judges in the country and also presided over the trial of Egypt’s longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak, later ordering his release.
Nicknamed the ‘death penalty judge’, he was responsible for handing down death sentences to hundreds of opponents of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi following the overthrow of the Morsi government more than a decade ago.
Al-Shami graduated from the Faculty of Law at Ain Shams University in Cairo in 1975 and was appointed to the Public Prosecution the following year.
His first assignment was investigating people involved in the 1977 riots, which erupted in cities across the country after then-president Anwar Sadat slashed food subsidies. Dozens were killed and wounded in the disorder, and hundreds were arrested before later being acquitted by the court.
Al-Shami was promoted Chief Prosecutor in the early 1980s before rising through the judicial ranks to join the Cairo Criminal Court in 2002.
His most significant verdicts came in the period after the 2011 revolution, when he presided over several high-profile trials and assisted with the government’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.In 2015.
He convicted and sentenced to death Morsi and more than 100 others for participating in a prison break during the 2011 uprising.
Morsi’s death sentence was later overturned but he died in an Egyptian courtroom in 2019 after years of medical neglect in prison.
Other figures given the death penalty by Al-Shami include the Egyptian Islamic scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who received a death sentence in absentia.
Three Brotherhood leaders, including its supreme guide, Mohamed Badie, were sentenced to life in prison.
Al-Shami also ordered the release of Hosni Mubarak following his corruption trial and rejected the Public Prosecution’s appeal against the verdict.
