Egypt executed nine men accused of killing the country’s former top prosecutor on Wednesday, bringing the total of those executed in the country to 15 in less than three weeks.

The men were among 28 sentenced to death for the murder of Hisham Barakat, Egypt’s former public prosecutor, who was assassinated when a car bomb struck his vehicle in 2015.

Human rights campaigners said that the 15 people executed in recent weeks were convicted following confessions extracted under torture and unjust trials.

“This trial was a monument to unfair trials in Egypt,” said Hussein Baoumi of Amnesty International. “You can see from the start that many of those convicted were forcibly disappeared at the beginning, then tortured into giving confessions.”

Egypt’s interior ministry chose to release videos of the men confessing to Barakat’s killing, stating that they visited the Gaza Strip for training by the Palestinian islamist group Hamas. Some of the men later retracted their confessions during the trial, adding they were given under torture.

The hanging of the nine men was the third set of executions held since 7 February, when three men were hanged for the murder of a judge’s son in 2014.

On 13 February, three more men were put to death concerning the murder of a police officer in the town of Kerdasa, during violence that took place following the overthrow of the former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. Amnesty International said that both sets of trials were marred by confessions extracted under torture.

Baoumi branded the three sets of executions, all held within three weeks, “an execution spree”. He said the choice to execute 15 men within such a short space of time was in retaliation for an attack on a checkpoint in the Sinai peninsula that killed 15 soldiers, and a suicide bomb attack in central Cairo that killed three policemen.

“Our assessment is that this stems from [the] fact that when there is militant attack or failure to protect soldiers, that this is a retaliation in one way or another,” he said. “You can see how this fits into a vengeance approach from the state.”

Diaa Rashwan, the head of Egypt’s state information service, did not respond when contacted for comment.

The use of the death penalty, forced disappearances and torture have spiked since the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, swept to power in a military coup in 2013, with many of the death sentences issued to civilians subjected to military trials. The Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights estimated that at least 32 people were executed in 2018, with over 600 death sentences issued in the first eleven months of last year.﻿