UK legal team urges police to arrest Egypt’s Sisi during London visit over Morsi death

A legal group in the UK has lodged complaint with the London police, calling for an arrest warrant against Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi over his alleged role in the death of Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president, at a Cairo court session last year.

The International Justice Chambers (Guernica 37) asked London’s Metropolitan Police Service Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) to launch a probe into the “credible allegations of torture made against the Egyptian Government and its State organs” in the complaint filed ahead of Sisi’s arrival in the UK on Monday for a two-day visit.

Morsi, a senior figure in Egypt’s now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood organization, was elected as Egypt’s president after a 2011 revolution.

He was, however, deposed through a bloody military coup led by his then-army chief and now President Sisi in July 2013.

Morsi, 67, had been serving prison terms on several charges before passing away in a Cairo court while on trial on espionage charges last year in June. He suffered from medical neglect during his imprisonment as well as poor conditions in prison.

“In particular, the complaint will request that the death of... Morsi, and the treatment suffered prior to his death, which constitutes torture, be investigated,” the legal group said. “the United Kingdom cannot be seen as a safe haven for those who consider themselves immune from prosecution.”

Back in November 2019, a panel of UN experts said Morsi’s detention conditions “could amount to a state-sanctioned arbitrary killing.”

The panel concluded that Morsi was held under conditions that can only be described as brutal, particularly during his five-year detention in the Tora prison complex.”

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The British panel also pointed out that it “is inconceivable to consider that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was unaware of the torture of Dr. Morsi.”

“It is no mere assumption that the treatment of Dr. Morsi contributed to his death and there is a compelling argument that it was his treatment at the hands of the Military Regime that killed him and that this was the intention,” said the chamber.

The Muslim Brotherhood has labeled Morsi’s death as a full-fledged murder. The organization said Egyptian authorities were responsible for his deliberate slow death.

On Friday, the Times of London wrote in an editorial that Sis’s anticipated arrival in London “to participate in the government’s UK-Africa summit will rightly stick in many people’s craw.”

It said that Sisi “has proved himself to be a particularly brutal dictator even by the standards of Egypt’s unfortunate history.”

Human rights groups have already warned that thousands more prisoners in Egypt were enduring similar conditions that led to the death of Morsi, and their “health and lives” may also be at severe risk.

The president has long been facing international condemnation for a crackdown on civil society groups and pro-Morsi activists since he took power in 2014.

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