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U.S. Leader Condemns Egypt After Examining Trial Records

February 4, 1955
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A strongly worded statement condemning the Egyptian Government for executing two Jews in Cairo and for imposing “savage” sentences on six other Jews charged with “Zionist espionage” was issued here today by Roger Baldwin, leader of the American Civil Liberties Union and chairman of the International League for the Rights of Man, who examined the proceedings of the trial on a recent visit to Cairo.

“It was shocking that two of the defendants in the Zionist case were sentenced to death and savage sentences imposed on others,” Mr. Baldwin said in his statement. “The conspiracy did not involve any serious acts of espionage or sabotage. It was, as the defense said, a childish and irrational affair of young people acting on instructions of two agents who escaped and were not condemned.”

Mr. Baldwin pointed out that “the Egyptian revolution, which claims so many measures for the human rights of its people, will suffer in world opinion for this vindictive judgment, unique in condemning to death two men guilty of no act of violence or of the transmission abroad of secret information.”

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