Ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and more than 100 other prisoners were sentenced to death on Saturday, the New York Times reports. Morsi was on trial for having fled prison during the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.

Morsi was Egypt’s first democratically-elected leader. He was deposed in 2013, after a year in office. In a statement, Amr Darrag, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was also a cabinet minister under Morsi, said that the sentencing was a symbol “of the dark shadow of authoritarianism that is now cast back over Egypt.”

From the Times:

The case against Mr. Morsi centers on a prison break that took place at the peak of the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Morsi and other Brotherhood officials had been detained, taken from their homes or from street protests, along with many other Egyptians swept up in the turmoil. Mr. Morsi had been held for two days at Wadi Natroun prison, on the highway between Cairo and Alexandria.

The escape came on the night of Jan. 28, 2011, after a day of street battles between the police and protesters. In the chaos of the uprising, some of the guards at Wadi Natroun had abandoned their posts. Armed men overcame the prison’s remaining guards, freeing thousands of inmates, including Mr. Morsi and other Islamist leaders.

Mr. Morsi announced his escape in a call from a satellite phone to the news channel Al Jazeera. Neither before nor during his tenure as president did he face charges over the episode.

The 105 defendants sentenced on Saturday include around 70 Palestinians, the Associated Press reports, many tried in absentia. Prosecutors alleged that factions from Palestine’s Hamas party—a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood—infiltrated Egypt during the 2011 revolt against Mubarak and freed nearly 20,000 prisoners.

A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, told the AP that “some of those convicted were killed before the Egyptian revolution and others are serving prison terms in Israel.” The death sentences will be referred to the grand mufti, Egypt’s highest Sunni Muslim religious authority, for his opinion. A hearing is scheduled for June 2nd.

“In light of the politically charged environment within which the Morsi prosecutions are taking place, the perception by some may be that these trials are more about political retaliation than bona fide criminal activity,” Mona El-Ghobashy, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University, wrote in an email to the Times. “The self-appointed permanent guardians of the state, judiciary and military are messaging that the revolution’s political results (free elections, civilian president, right to protest) were unnatural, unreal and unsustainable.”

“They’re saying to Egyptians: This whole business of democracy and choosing your rulers is a fantasy. That’s not the way power works here.”

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.