An Egyptian court referred five university students Monday to military trial over a violent protest, judicial sources said, under a controversial new law expanding the army's powers to try civilians.

The students from Cairo's Islamic Al-Azhar University were sent for trial after a protest in January during which part of a campus building was torched.

Hundreds of students have been tried in civilian courts after violence on campuses, bastions of pro-Islamist activists following the army's overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi last year.

Under a law passed last month, state-owned institutions are now regarded as military facilities and attacking them as a crime against the armed forces.

The military already had the right to try civilians accused of attacking its personnel, but the new decree grants the army far broader jurisdiction.

The law was issued after a militant attack killed at least 30 soldiers in the Sinai, and after months of violent protests against Morsi's overthrow.

The new legislation also puts the military in charge of guarding vital installations including major thoroughfares and bridges.

Rights groups have condemned the law, and say military tribunals often result in swift and harsh sentences.

"This law represents another nail in the coffin of justice in Egypt," said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East and North Africa director for the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

"Its absurdly broad provisions mean that many more civilians who engage in protests can now expect to face trial before uniformed judges subject to the orders of their military superiors."

The government has said the decree was aimed at militants, not protesters who have already been targeted by a ban on all but police-sanctioned demonstrations.

In a separate case on Monday, a military court in the city of Suez sentenced 17 Islamists to up to seven years in jail for inciting violence and attacking soldiers and military vehicles on August 14, 2013, hours after police stormed two sit-ins of pro-Morsi protesters in Cairo.

One defendant was acquitted, an army source said.

Hundreds of demonstrators were killed when security forces stormed the two Cairo sit-ins.

Spain sees surge in home-grown terror arrests: experts
Madrid (AFP) Nov 17, 2014 - Spain is seeing an unprecedented surge in home-grown Islamist extremism with more young Spanish Muslims than ever detained for links to terrorist groups in Syria, experts warned on Monday.

Top experts on Islamist radicalism from Spain's Royal Elcano international studies institute said the number of native Spaniards arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences had surged since the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2011 and the ongoing violence in Iraq.

"Since the start of the conflict in Iraq and Syria, the vast majority of those arrested in Spain were Spanish nationals born in Spain," said Fernando Reinares, the institute's lead researcher on international terrorism.

Previously, only a fraction of such suspects were Spanish nationals, he said at the presentation of a new report on jihadism in Spain.

"We are seeing the hatching of home-grown jihadism. This is not new in Britain and France, but it is new in Spain and Italy."

The report principally analysed the 90 cases of men who were convicted of terrorism charges in Spain, or killed in terrorist-related violence there, between 1995 and 2013.

But Reinares said there were also many people detained on similar charges who have not yet been tried.

He added "the vast majority" of those still-untried cases were second-generation Muslim men from Spain's two territories bordering Morocco: Ceuta and Melilla.

A string of bombings on Madrid commuter trains killed 191 people in March 2004. Five of the suspected authors of those attacks later blew themselves up in a block of flats.

The Spanish government says it has arrested dozens of people suspected of links to groups sending fighters to launch attacks with jihadist groups in Syria.