On 30 May 2023, the Libyan Misrata Court of Appeals issued sentences in a case involving men who had been Daesh (also known as Islamic State IS) fighters. Twenty-three of the IS fighters were sentenced to death, 14 to life imprisonment, seven to 10 – 12 years in prison, and two to 3 – 5 years in prison. Five were acquitted, and the criminal case had expired for two who had died.
The fighters had been tried for multiple charges which included the infamous beheading of 21 Christians—20 Copts and one Ghanaian—on a beach in Sirte in 2015; bombing the city gate of Msallata in 2015; bombing the police training centre in the city of Zliten in 2016. All these crimes had at the time been claimed by IS.
In August 2022, a trial began in Misurata of 320 Libyan, Syrian, Sudanese and Egyptian suspects who belonging to IS; most of them had been arrested during battles in Sirte between the forces of the former Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA) and IS.
The Libya Martyrs, also referred to as The 21, were 20 Copts and one Ghanaian who were beheaded for their faith by IS on a beach in Sirte in 2015.
They were canonised by the Coptic Church in 2018, and the day their beheading was publicised by IS, 15 February, was declared an annual Day for Modern-Day Martyrs.
The bodies of the 21 were handed to Egypt in 2018 by Libyan authorities, and are now kept in a shrine built for them at the church of Martyrs of Faith and the Nation in the village of al-Our in Minya, some 250km south of Cairo, which had been the home village of 13 of the martyrs. In 2020, the body of the Ghanaian Matthew Ayariga was handed to the Coptic Church in Egypt, which had requested it since no one from Ghana had claimed it, and was laid to rest with his brother martyrs in the shrine at al- Our.
Watani International
30 May 2023
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