CAIRO, July 4 — Egypt’s top appeals court upheld today 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 (RM1.6 million).

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, Islamist 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. — AFP