Egypt’s Giza Criminal Court on Thursday ordered that 13 convicts be executed for launching terrorist attacks against security forces, official MENA news agency reported.
The convicts were from a disbanded militant group that referred itself as Ajnad Misr (Soldiers of Egypt).
They were charged with installing explosive devices.
The explosive devices targeted various venues which included checkpoints, police stations, vital institutions and public properties as well as murdering policemen and citizens.
On Oct. 8, Giza Criminal Court referred the files of the 13 defendants to the country’s highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti, for his non-binding Islamic legal opinion on their execution.
The case started in July 2014 and it includes 44 defendants in total.
The execution verdict comes about two weeks after a terrorist attack against a mosque in North Sinai killed at least 310 Muslim worshippers and wounded over 120 others.
This is the deadliest terror operation and the first against a Muslim mosque in Egypt’s modern history.
Egypt has been fighting against a wave of terror activities that killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers since the military toppled former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
This came as a response to mass protests against his one-year rule and his currently blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood group.
Terror attacks in Egypt focused on targeting police and military men in North Sinai before spreading nationwide and targeting the Coptic minority as well, with most of them claimed by a Sinai-based group loyal to the regional Islamic State (IS) militant group.
Ajnad Misr pledged allegiance to the IS in 2014, a year before its founder was killed as announced by the Egyptian police in April 2015.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian military and police have killed hundreds of militants and arrested a similar number of suspects as part of the country’s anti-terror war declared by President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the army chief then, following Morsi’s removal.
