CAIRO: Prominent Egy­ptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah is to appear in court on Monday after spending more than two years in pre-trial detention, a lawyer and family members said.

Abdel Fattah, his lawyer Mohamed al-Baqer and blogger Mohamed Ibrahim will be tried in a State Security court whose verdicts cannot be appealed, lawyer Khaled Ali said on Saturday on social media.

Abdel Fattah’s mother Leila Soueif said her son had been questioned in September about “spreading false news”.

“We do not know exactly what the accusations are because the lawyers haven’t been officially notified yet,” she said. His sister Mona Seif visited him on Saturday at Cairo’s notorious Tora prison, where he told her the news, Soueif said.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2021