CAIRO: An Egyptian criminal court from the Mediterranean city of Port Said Tuesday sentenced 11 people to death over a 2012 football riot that killed more than 70 people and injured hundreds in what was Egypt’s worst football disaster to date and one of the world’s deadliest.

The verdict, read by presiding judge Mohammad al-Said, came at the end of the retrial of 73 defendants in a case that sparked deadly riots in 2013 in Port Said, prompting then-President Mohammad Morsi to declare a state of emergency in the city.

The court also sentenced 40 defendants to up to 15 years in prison and acquitted the rest. The verdicts can be appealed.

The February 2012 riot began at the end of a league match in Port Said between Cairo’s Al-Ahly, Egypt’s most successful club, and home side Al-Masry. The riot led to the temporary suspension of Egypt’s top-flight football league. The league later resumed, but with matches played in empty stadiums.

The first Egyptian Premier League game in which fans were allowed back into the stadiums was played in February this year, but that occasion was also marred by the death of 22 fans in a stampede outside the grounds. The stampede followed the use of tear gas by police to stop what authorities at the time said was an attempt by fans to storm the military-owned stadium in a suburb of Cairo.

In the Feb. 2, 2012, Port Said incident, Al-Masry fans attacked Al-Ahly supporters with knives, clubs and rocks after the match. Witnesses and survivors described victims falling from the bleachers as they tried to escape. Hundreds of others fled into an exit passage, only to be crushed against a locked gate with their rivals attacking from behind.

At one point, the stadium lights went out, plunging it into darkness. The match’s TV sportscaster explained that authorities shut them off to “calm the situation.” The prosecution said in the indictment that switching off the lights was meant to give the attackers a cover of darkness.

Among those sentenced were Port Said’s police chief and another senior police officer, both receiving five-year jail sentences. Al-Masry’s executive director Mohsen Shettah and a stadium official in charge of the lighting were also sentenced to five years in prison.

The prosecution claimed the police had facilitated the attack by not searching Al-Masry supporters on entering the stadium, thus allowing them to come inside the grounds armed with knives, clubs and homemade explosives. The police, it continued, also seated Al-Masry supporters close to the area designated for the rival Al-Ahly fans. Police stood by and did nothing to stop the attackers, it added.

Most of the victims of the 2012 riot belonged to Al-Ahly’s “ultras,” an association of hard-core fans who have long been at sharp odds with the nation’s highly militarized police, taunting them with offensive slogans during matches and fighting them in street battles.

Ultras members have been credited with playing a major role in the 18-day popular uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, as well as subsequent street clashes with police. They were among the chief defenders of Tahrir Square when Mubarak loyalists charged protesters on Feb. 2, 2011, one of the deadliest days of the uprising.