24 in Sadat-plot trial

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 9

24 in Sadat-plot trial

NZPA-Reuter Cairo Egyptian authorities announced yesterday that 24 people will go on trial this month accused of taking part in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat.

An indictment published by military prosecutors named the accused, among them students and, three soldiers, and gave a detailed account of how the President was shot as he took the salute at an armed forces’ parade on October 6. The trial was set to open in public before three Army judges on November 21. It appeared that most' of the defendants faced possible death sentences. The indictment divided the

accused into several groups of assassins, accomplices, and conspirators. Four men were charged with killing Mr Sadat and seven other people who died in a hail of grenades and machine-gun fire as they watched the parade.

The indictment said the four were led by Lieutenant Khaled Ahmed Shawki Isiambouli, who managed to get the three others aboard his truck before it rolled by the reviewing stand where the President sat. The three others in his group were identified as a sergeant and two civilians who had served in the armed forces.

Another accused was Ab-

del-Salam Farag, a young engineer, who, according to the indictment, urged the killers to carry out the assassination in the name of Islam.

The indictment also named a blind Muslim preacher, Sheikh Omar Ahmed Abdul Rahman from Cairo's AlAzhar University, as a leader of “renegade groups." It said he knew of the plot. Most of the 18 others named in the indictment were students charged with conspiring and assisting the assassins “by espousing extremist ideas which incited the killing of the head of State” and by providing them with ammunition.