More than 20 sentenced to death in Libya for Islamic State campaign

A court in Libya sentenced 23 people to death and another 14 to life in prison on Monday for their role in a deadly Islamic State militant campaign that included beheading a group of Egyptian Christians and seizing the city of Sirte in 2015, Reuters reported.

The Attorney General’s office said in a statement that one other person was sentenced to 12 years in prison, six to 10 years, one to five years and six to three years while five were acquitted and three others died before their case came to trial.

Islamic State’s Libyan branch was one of the militant group’s strongest outside its original territory in Iraq and Syria, taking advantage of the chaos and warfare that followed a 2011 NATO-backed uprising.

In 2015 it launched an attack on the luxury Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli, killing nine people, before abducting and beheading dozens of Egyptian Christians whose deaths it featured in grisly propaganda films, the media reported.