Egypt charges 379 with murder over 2013 Cairo unrest
Egyptian prosecutors pressed murder charges against 379 people Wednesday over the deaths of policemen and civilians during the bloody dispersal of Islamist protest camps in the capital in 2013, AFP reports.
It was not immediately clear how many of the defendants were in custody but it was the latest in a string of controversial mass trials to be announced over the violence that followed the army's overthrow of President Mohammad Morsi in July that year.
Prosecutors charge that the defendants took part in an "armed sit-in" at the capital's Nahda Square in August 2013, and in "armed marches that attacked civilians" in several parts of Cairo.
"Their action resulted in casualties among policemen and civilians," a prosecution statement said.
Cairo's Nahda and Rabaa squares were the locations of protest camps set up by Morsi's supporters that were broken up by police on August 14, 2013 at the cost of hundreds of lives.