The teenage 'terrorists' who have united Egypt

One of the 15-year-old girls plays the guitar and enjoys going for a daily walk before school with her mother. The other likes painting and watching cartoons on television.

When Rawda el-Saadany and Salma Reda Mohammed got caught up in a small Muslim Brotherhood demonstration a month ago, their families thought they could just go to the police station and bring them home, as countless other parents had done in recent years.

But the girls, along with five other minors, were all sentenced to indefinite terms of detention by a justice system that seems to many Egyptians to have gone mad.

"Does this look like a typical terrorist to you?" Rawda's father asked through his tears as he held up a picture of his daughter playing the guitar.

Egypt's famously fragmented opposition has united around its outrage at the jailing of the seven girls and 14 young women.

Though the women were accused of being "members of a terrorist organisation", of blocking traffic, carrying weapons and throwing stones, the evidence was innocuous. There was certainly a small protest that briefly blocked a road and some of the protesters, male and female, threw stones after residents of a building poured water on them. But no evidence was presented that any of the women was personally responsible. No weapons were produced.

The sentences have re-energised protests against the regime; even anti-Brotherhood figures such as Hamdeen Sabbahy, the leading Leftist politician who backed the army's overthrowing of President Mohamed Morsi, called for the sentences to be overturned.

The families of Rawda and Salma insist that they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time - but no one had responded to their statements when the group were taken to court last week.

In proceedings that have been attacked by human rights groups and the girls' relatives, the judge hinted that he saw no case to answer.

But later that night the families turned on the television to hear that the girls had been given custodial sentences.

The 14 adult women with them in the caged dock that day, including Rawda's mother, Salwa, were jailed for 11 years.

"When I saw it on the news, I was in such a state of shock that I thought I would go crazy," said Rawda's father, Ramada el-Saadany.

"I can't stay here any more. In this country you can't breathe for the blood that's all around you."