Heavy police deployment in Cairo on anniversary of mass protester killing

According to Human Rights Watch, the Rabaa Massacre is “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history”.

After establishing the 30 June Fact-Finding Committee in December 2013, to investigate the killings and the events that precipitated and followed the protests, the Egyptian Government released an executive summary of the committee’s findings in November 2014, but failed to recommend charges against any government official or member of the security forces.

The protest camps in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya and Nahda squares were in support of Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president who had been ousted in a military coup weeks earlier. The HRW has said that the massacre “probably amounted to crimes against humanity”.

Egypt’s government has defended the dispersal as necessary to tackle armed “terrorists”, and it brushed aside HRW’s appeal for the UN Human Rights Council to set up an worldwide commission of inquiry. More than 90 others, including influential cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi, were sentenced to death in absentia.

The defence for ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi filed an appeal against a death sentence and prison term for the former leader, a lawyer said on Saturday.

The Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, in the center of the largest protest camp, suffered severe fire damage following the attacks on August 14, 2013.

On Friday, Egyptians took to the streets to mark the second anniversary of the August 2013 attacks.

Hundreds of his supporters have also been sentenced to death in a crackdown following Morsi’s overthrow.

But the National Alliance for the Defense of Legitimacy, Morsi’s main support bloc and the sit-in’s main organizer, said thousands were killed in the dispersal. Its popularity began to dramatically slide after Morsi took office in June 2012 and he decreed himself above any sort of oversight later that year and became increasingly perceived to be working for the Brotherhood and its supporters, not all Egyptians.