Egyptian sentenced over anti-Islam film

Egypt's supreme court

A Cairo court sentenced an Egyptian Coptic Christian to three years in prison on Wednesday for posting online parts of a US-made anti-Islam film blamed for deadly unrest in the Muslim world.

Albert Saber, 27, was convicted of “denigrating religions,” a court official said.

He was arrested in September after neighbours called authorities to say he had posted on the Internet extracts of “Innocence of Muslims,” an amateur film depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a thuggish deviant which triggered a wave of violent protests that left dozens dead in Muslim countries that month.

During his trial, Saber denied the charges against him, which at the time included blasphemy and incitement to sedition.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International condemned the guilty verdict as “an outrageous assault on freedom of expression,” and described him as “a prisoner of conscience.”

“This is an outrageous verdict and sentence for a person whose only ‘crime’ was to post his opinions online,” said the London-based watchdog’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.

“The conviction will ruin his life,” she added.

Last month, a US court sent the man behind the controversial film, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian named Mark Basseley Youssef, 55, to prison for breaching probation in an unrelated case, over a 2010 bank fraud conviction.

According to court papers, Youssef wrote and produced the trailer of the anti-Islam film, and uploaded an English-language version of it onto YouTube in July 2, followed by a version dubbed into Arabic in September.