A court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Wednesday convicted 53 people on terrorism charges and handed them down jail terms ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment, the Gulf country's official news agency WAM reported.
The case is dubbed in the media as the case of the "terrorist Justice and Dignity Organization" set up allegedly to carry out terrorist attacks inside the UAE, a federation of seven emirates.
The defendants belong to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, WAM said.
Forty-three of them were sentenced to life imprisonment while five others were given 15 years in prison.
Five co-defendants were sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The court based in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi ordered some defendants and companies linked to the case pay fines ranging from 10 million Emirati dirhams ($2.7 million) to 20 million Dirhams each.
The rulings can be appealed at the Supreme Federal Court, the agency said.
The rights group Amnesty International slammed the procedure as a "mass sham trial" and called for the defendants' immediate release.
The watchdog said nearly all defendants in the case have already spent 11 years in prison as victims of a previous mass trial.
"The trial has been a shameless parody of justice and violated multiple fundamental principles of law, including the principle that you cannot try the same person twice for the same crime," Devin Kenney, Amnesty’s UAE researcher, said in a statement.
The court said the case was different from another one dating back to 2012, according to WAM.