How Egyptian 4-year-old faced life sentence
Faulty record-keeping in Egypt's military court system could have landed a little boy in jail.
Mansour al-Qurani never suspected that a small mistake — a mistake not even of his own making — would put his family’s fate in danger. Yet last month, his 4-year-old son was sentenced to life in prison for supposedly participating in a deadly riot in 2014.
It took five days and the family's appearance on TV to convince the military a mistake had been made.
An official in charge of conducting criminal investigations accidentally included the little boy's name on a list of 116 alleged offenders. A military court in Cairo delivered his sentence Feb. 16.
The father told Al-Monitor that he found out about the ruling through the media and that security forces tried to carry out the judgment. He said he had to submit his child’s birth certificate to prove that the investigators’ information was not true. The family was forced to leave their home.
