Egypt sentences embassy attackers

A Cairo court has issued suspended one-year jail terms for 75 Egyptians who were among rioters who stormed the Israeli embassy last year. It also ordered a five-year jail term for a suspect who it tried in absentia. The Emergency Supreme State Security Court in Egypt, headed by Nur al-Din Yusuf, handed out the sentence for events that occured during the occurred during the "million-man march" of "Jumaet Tasheh el masar" (Friday of Correcting the Path), which resulted in three deaths and 149 being injured. Prosecutors had accused the defendants of "attacks on diplomatic missions" and "sabotage." On September 9, 2011, hundreds of Egyptian demonstrators broke away from a pro-democracy protest on nearby Tahrir Square against Egypt's then-military-led government and broke into Israel's embassy by demolishing a concrete security wall. Some rioters also stoned the nearby Saudi embassy. The storming of the Israeli embassy followed the killing in August 2011 of five Egyptian security guards by Israeli soldiers who had been pursuing Palestinian militants accused of killing Israelis along Israel's border with Egypt's Sinai region. As Israel's ambassador and staff fled Cairo on the following day, Egyptian authorities said they would prosecute those who stormed the embassy. Egypt was under pressure from Israel and its ally the United States to honour the 1979 Egypt-Israeli peace accord. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned Egypt at the time that the storming of his country's embassy had inflicted a "severe injury to the fabric of peace" between the two countries. In recent weeks, in the wake of the killing of 16 more Egyptian border guards at a Sinai outpost near Rafah on August 5, Egypt's new government under President Mohammed Morsi has sent extra military units into the Sinai to pursue Islamist militants. Rafah is a key access route - bypassing Israel - for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.