Any suspension would effectively prevent Olympic medallists Mohamed Ehab and Sara Samir, world champion Neama Said, and their fellow national team athletes from competing in the Paris 2024 qualifying programme.

Ehab was the most high-profile victim when his federation was banned for two years in September 2019 because of seven positive cases at the 2016 African Youth and Junior Championships, five of which were by teenagers.

He did not test positive himself but was prevented from competing at the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Six Egyptians have agreed to accept retrospective two-year suspensions for doping violations at the 2019 African Games in Rabat, Morocco.

Samir (who competes as Sara Ahmed), the first female weightlifter from the Arab world to win an Olympic medal, is among the six.

None of them has competed since the samples were collected nearly three years ago.

They all came up positive not for steroids, which would have been a more serious offence, but for a stimulant, 5-methylhexan-2-amine.

The Organising Committee of the African Games, COJAR, disqualified all six athletes but is now defunct and there has been a considerable delay in processing and closing the cases.

The International Testing Agency (ITA), which carries out all anti-doping procedures for the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), took over to determine the length of suspensions, which ran from January 2020 until January this year.

Last December, there was regime change at the Egyptian Weightlifting Federation.

Mahmoud Mahgoub, who had been in control for many years, stood down as President and was replaced by Mohamed Abdel Maksod, who told insidethegames that the organisation was "looking forward to co-operating with the ITA to fix previous mistakes".

The ITA did not give a timelines but said "the consequences to be imposed on the Egyptian Weightlifting Federation will be referred by the ITA to the IWF’s Independent Member Federation Sanctioning Panel for its determination".

"Under Article 12 of the IWF Anti-Doping Rules when three or more ADRVs sanctioned by the IWF are committed by athletes, officials or athlete support personnel within a 12-month period, the member federation can be suspended, fined and/or have other rights withdrawn."

The six who were retrospectively banned were Samar Habashy, 26, a multiple super-heavyweight medallist in continental championships; Mohamed Abdelrahman Elsayed, 33, another super-heavyweight weightlifter; Ibrahim Moustafa Wahid Shaaban, 25, a multiple medallist in continental championships at 73kg and 69kg; Sara Samir, 24, a double junior world champion and Olympic bronze medallist at 69kg in Rio six years ago; Farag Salma Ahmed Mahmoud Awad, 20, the 2019 African champion at 81kg; and Abdelalim Mahmoud Selim, 24, the 2019 African champion at 96kg.