Egypt Sentences United States Citizen to Life in Prison

According to a report from gawker, on Saturday, an American citizen, Mohamed Soltan, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Egypt for his support of an Islamist protest in the summer of 2013, the New York Times reports. The presiding judge sentenced more than 35 other defendants in the case to the same penalty, while fourteen senior members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood were sentenced to death.

Soltan graduated from The Ohio State University in 2012 and was working in Cairo at a petroleum services company. His father, Salah Soltan, was a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohamed was critical of the group, but also opposed the military's removal of President Mohamed Morsi.

Mr. Soltan began volunteering as a translator for Western journalists covering the Islamist sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square to protest the takeover. Security forces forcibly broke up the sit-in on Aug. 14, 2013, killing nearly a thousand, according to the best estimates provided by Human Rights Watch and others. Mr. Soltan was shot in the arm during the assault on the sit-in, and the police arrested him at his home several days later. He has remained in jail since then.

He and the others in the case were reportedly accused of joining a command center at the sit-in that sought to spread chaos across Egypt in defiance of the government.