CAIRO: EGYPTIAN-CANADIAN CONVICTED OF SPYING FOR ISRAEL

Bad but unsurprising news from Egypt:

It took all of 15 seconds, but for a former Toronto bank teller named Mohamed el-Attar those few brief moments spelled 15 years in an Egyptian jail.
In a one-sentence ruling issued here this morning, Judge Sayyed el-Gohary of Egypt’s State Security Emergency Court found el-Attar guilty on all three charges against him, all involving allegations that he betrayed the country of his birth by committing acts of espionage on behalf of neighbouring Israel.

Clad in a grey suit and a ceremonial green sash, the bespectacled judge gave no reasons for his verdict and promptly departed the courtroom as bedlam immediately erupted, with spectators swarming toward the steel prisoner’s cage where the diminutive el-Attar, clad in a white prison jump suit, was at once hustled away without saying a word.

Only moments earlier, he had entered the cage with both hands raised, fingers crossed. The gesture turned out to be futile.

“I was convinced he would be acquitted,” said Ibrahim Bassiouni, the Egyptian lawyer who represented el-Attar after another lawyer abandoned the case nearly two months ago. As he spoke, Bassiouni was surrounded by jostling camera crews from some 20 different Egyptian, Arab, and Canadian TV services, as well as a host of print reporters. “They had no concrete evidence against the defendant.”

Only an hour prior to today’s ruling, the silver-maned lawyer had been confidently predicting that his client would be acquitted.

Despite what they say, it doesn't surprise me at all that el-Attar was convicted. Not after how Israeli-Druze citizen Azzam Azzam was a decade ago in a similar situation.

Now, what needs to be done is to get el-Attar some foreign aid to be released.