Cairo: An Egyptian court has upheld sentencing Hesham Talaat Mustafa, a business mogul, to 15 years in prison on charges of inciting the killing of a Lebanese singer in Dubai more than three years ago, judicial sources said.
The decision was made by the Court of Cassation, Egypt's highest judicial authority, at a retrial of Mustafa, a former lawmaker, and Mohssen Al Sukkari, the prime defendant in the high-profile case, added the sources.
The same court upheld a 25-year jail sentence handed down to Al Sukkari, an ex-policeman, by another court, said the sources.
Mustafa was accused of having hired al-Sukkari for killing the Lebanese pop singer Suzan Tamim in return for two million dollars
The verdicts are irreversible.
The sentences followed a 10-hour hearing of the trial that began on Monday, according to the sources.
Both defendants have pleaded not guilty since the case came to the surface in the summer of 2008.
Their defence lawyers on Monday argued for their innocence, claiming that the evidence cited by prosecutors in the case was damaged and that the testimonies given by witnesses were conflicting.
Abdul Rauf Mahdi, Mustafa's lawyer, told the court that his client had been framed up in the case due to alleged business rivalry.
In May 2009, a criminal court sentenced Mustafa and al-Sukkari to death over killing Tamim. The sentencing was commuted in September 2010.
The case, dubbed in the local press as the case of love and blood, generated massive attention across the Arab world.
Mustafa is one of Egypt’s top real-estate developers and a leading politician in the toppled president Hosni Mubarak's now-disbanded party. He had reportedly fallen for Suzan who jilted him after allegedly swindling him out of a fortune.
Suzan, 30, was found dead in her luxury apartment in Dubai in August 2008.
