Egyptian Blogger Sentenced to Prison
Friday, February 23, 2007
A disheartening follow-up to our post of last week on Middle Eastern bloggers: An Egyptian blogger was convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak, and sentenced to four years in jail on Thursday, in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger. Abdel Kareem Nabil, a 22-year-old former student at Egypt's Al-Azhar University, an Islamic institution, had pleaded innocent to all charges, and human rights groups had called for his release. Nabil, who used the blogger name Kareem Amer, had sharply criticised Al-Azhar on his web log, calling it "the university of terrorism" and accusing it of suppressing free thought. The university threw him out last year and pressed prosecutors to put him on trial. He also often criticised Mubarak's regime on the blog. The judge issued the verdict in a brief, five-minute session in a court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. He sentenced Nabil to three years in prison for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and another year for insulting Mubarak. Nabil had faced a possible maximum sentence of up to nine years in prison.
Posted by B Feiler at 7:53 AM
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