An Egyptian military court on Wednesday sentenced two men to death for beheading an army officer during the uprising that ousted strongman Hosni Mubarak, the official MENA news agency reported. Three others received life sentences, and two more were jailed for 15 years each for the murder of the army officer in a police station on February 7 last year, during the anti-Mubarak revolt which later brought the army to power.
The men, drug dealers, tortured the officer before they killed him, severed his head and hung it from the roof of the police station south of Cairo which they then burnt down, the agency reported. The military has sentenced thousands of civilians in military trials since taking power and several of them having been sentenced to death. Mubarak called the military to the streets on January 28, 2011, after nationwide protests targeted his despised police forces.