Sarah Carr reports:
A low ranking police officer who fatally shot a man has been sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.
Alaa Tharwat Abdel Maqsoud was convicted yesterday by a court in Suez of murdering Muhammad Nasr Ibrahim.
According to the Torture in Egypt website, Ibrahim, a milkman was killed after an altercation over a driving license which occurred in a public square in Suez in 2007.
Ibrahim’s license application procedures had not been completed when he was stopped by Abdel Maqsoud while riding a motorbike, and was unable to hand over a license when Ibrahim demanded one of him.
Abdel Maqsoud responded by attempting to confiscate Ibrahim’s motorbike. When the latter refused, Abdel Maqsoud shot him in the neck at point blank range.
Abdel Maqsoud pleaded self-defense during the trial.
The heavy prison sentence is unusual in Egypt, where violations by the police are routine but officers rarely held to account, or handed down relatively light sentences.
Haitham Mohamadein, a lawyer with the Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence who represented the victim’s family, told Daily News Egypt that he attributes the sentence to the “large numbers of eyewitnesses” who saw the incident and “the extremely narrow margin available for tampering with evidence”.