Police officials said they were deploying in main streets and government buildings amid calls for protests to remember the event, one of deadliest of the Arab Spring period.
Advertisement
The human rights watchdog said the dispersal could amount to “crimes against humanity”, calling for an worldwide UN-led probe into the crackdown killings, a call that is described by the Egyptian foreign ministry as “ridiculous”.
The group said that Egyptian security forces, meanwhile, fired on makeshift medical facilities, and “positioned snipers to target whoever sought to enter or exit” the Rabaa hospital.
Hundreds of pro-Morsi demonstrators were killed when security forces violently dispersed their protest camps in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square and Giza’s Nahda Square on August 14, 2013, only weeks after Morsi was removed from power in a military coup.
The dispersal of the Rab’a al-Adawiya Square sit-in, where the crowd reached 85,000 at its height, was the worst of these incidents. Small scattered protests were reported mostly outside of Cairo, but there were no reports of major violence.
Morsi was detained without charge during the initial days of the 2011 uprising against the country’s veteran leader Hosni Mubarak, and escaped along with thousands of others after protesters attacked police stations across the country.
The United States and Egypt’s European allies, rather than seriously addressing the rank impunity of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government, contend that it is a national security priority to resume their relationships with Egypt, including providing Egypt with military aid and hardware. He has since been sentenced to death.
Abdul Moneim Abdul Maqsud, a lawyer for the Muslim brotherhood, said that the appeals are based on alleged shortcomings of evidence and violations of the accused’s defence rights in both cases.
Advertisement
The group has been blacklisted and most of its leaders arrested, severely restricting its ability to mobilise followers in protests.
