Human Rights Watch condemns the execution of 49 people in 10...

Human Rights Watch called on the Egyptian authorities to immediately halt executions, and to re-try those convicted in trials that “grossly lack justice,” according to the organization’s description.

The organization said in a press release published on Wednesday that the Egyptian authorities carried out death sentences against 49 people between the third and thirteenth of October.

Human Rights Watch said that 15 of those convicted were convicted of involvement in three cases of political violence, and that two women and 32 men were convicted in criminal cases in the aforementioned period.

Thirteen of the 15 convicted persons in political cases were held in Scorpion Prison in the capital, Cairo, according to the organization’s statement.

On September 23, before the execution of the death sentences, an incident which the organization described as “suspicious” took place inside the sentenced ward in the Scorpion high-security prison in Cairo Where Interior Ministry forces killed four of the detainees, they said they killed four security personnel.

In this incident, the authorities said that the detainees were trying to escape.

“The mass executions of dozens in Egypt within a few days are shocking,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “The systematic absence of fair trials in Egypt, especially in political cases, makes every verdict. Death penalty a violation of the right to life. “

Rights activists say that the Egyptian government does not announce the implementation of some death sentences, and may not even inform the families of the victims of them.

On October 13, local newspapers published the names of eight detainees, including a woman, who were executed in a high-security prison in Minya governorate, south of Cairo.

On the sixth of the same month, local pro-government newspapers said that the authorities in Cairos Appeals Prison carried out death sentences against eleven people, including a woman who had been convicted in criminal cases.

Local newspapers said that on the third of October, the authorities executed eight prisoners, and on the eighth of the same month, the authorities executed seven others in the northern governorate of Alexandria who had been convicted of “murder and rape.”

On October 7, the independent human rights center, Al-Shehab, published the names of 15 people it said that the authorities had executed them on the third of the same month.

Of these 15, ten were convicted in the case known in the media in Egypt as “Soldiers of Egypt” Three were convicted in the case known as the “Kerdasa case”; While two were convicted in the case known as the Alexandria Library case.

The cases of Kerdasa and the Library of Alexandria are related to violent incidents that coincided with the dispersal of the Rab’a sit-in on the 14th of August 2013, and the organization says that the dispersal witnessed the killing of “about a thousand participants in a sit-in (dominated by a peaceful character) in protest against the military overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi in that time”.

Egyptian authorities have consistently dismissed and criticized Human Rights Watch reports, describing them as politicized and impartial.

A spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry announced that the ministry had reservations in commenting on the reports of some organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and said that it often departs from objectivity, as he described it.