Cairo Jan. 9, (Aswat Masriya) - The Giza Criminal Court handed one-year prison sentences to eight defendants belonging to the football fans group Ultras White Knights (UWK) and acquitted five more defendants on Saturday.

The ruling was on the case popularly known as the “storming of the Zamalek club.” The UWK is the fan group for the Zamalek Club’s football team.

Last February clashes between the fan group and security sources outside a football stadium in Cairo left at least 19 of the football fans killed.

The clashes broke out ahead of a game between Zamalek and Enppi football clubs.

Then-Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat ordered conducting an autopsy on each of those killed.

According to the interior ministry, large numbers of Zamalek fans attempted to storm the stadium. The ministry added that security forces responded by trying to prevent assaults on stadium facilities.

But the UWK said on its Facebook page that the police "initiated firing teargas towards fans" outside the stadium, adding that many people have fainted and experienced suffocation. The group refers to the events as a “massacre.”

Following the events, in February, a juvenile court sentenced 10 members of the UWK group to two years in prison after they held a protest in Cairo’s Shubra neighbourhood.

Later, in June, the Court acquitted eight defendants who belonged to the UWK group of the charge of violating Egypt's protest law.

In May 2015, an Egyptian urgent matters court banned the activities of all ultras fan groups nationwide, accusing them of complicity in "riots" and vandalism. 

Public prosecution had charged the defendants with “illegal assembly, attempting to break into the Zamalek club, attempting to kill a worker, damaging the club’s main building, possessing firearms, and disturbing public peace and security.”

The Zamalek Sporting Club chairman, Mortada Mansour, had filed the lawsuit in 2015 after accusing the club's UWK unofficial fan group of attempting to kill him.

Lawyer Mohamed Rashwan said five of those sentenced were present in the session, while the other five were sentenced in absentia.

Groups of young football fans supporting a number of clubs have been at the heart of several events that followed the January 25 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak in 2011, after he ruled the country for 30 years.  

In February 2011, over 70 people were killed in Egypt's worst football disaster when Ahly Club fans were attacked by supporters of Port Said's team Masry, who stormed the pitch at the close of the match.