CAIRO — An Egyptian criminal court on Tuesday found more than three dozen employees of foreign nonprofit groups, including 16 Americans, guilty of receiving illegal funds from abroad and operating unlicensed organizations in what the United States has criticized as a politically motivated trial that mars Egypt’s transition to post-revolutionary democracy.

The defendants were given prison sentences of one to five years, with many of the Americans receiving the longest ones. But it appears unlikely that any of them will go to prison because most either left the country before the verdict or face suspended sentences.

The guilty verdicts underline Egyptian leaders’ persistent fear of foreign meddling as well as spotlight the institutional disorder that has allowed for politically motivated trials.

Since the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Egypt’s leaders — first a top military council, then President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood — have occasionally blamed foreign agitators for the country’s problems. At the same time, some of the groups that were singled out had operated in Egypt for years and said they were trying to navigate the process of official registration when investigations against them began.