Sisi regime court upholds 15-year sentence for prominent activist

Egypt's top appeals court upheld Saturday a 15-year prison sentence for a leading figure of the country's 2011 uprising, a judicial source told AFP.

Ahmed Douma has been jailed since 2013 on charges of clashing with security forces during a protest in Cairo two years earlier.

He received a 25-year prison sentence in 2015, but a court overturned the ruling in 2017 and ordered a retrial.

In January last year, Douma was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined six million Egyptian pounds ($372,000).

Saturday's verdict by the court of cassation upheld that sentence, which "is now final and cannot be appealed", the judicial source said.

Douma was a leading activist in the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak.

He was arrested in a crackdown following the 2013 military ouster of Mubarak's successor, Egypt's first democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, led by now-President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Thousands of Morsi's supporters as well as secular activists, lawyers and academics have been swept up in the crackdown.

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