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Egypt: Cancel Military Court Death Sentences
Convicted Civilians Alleged Torture, Forcible Disappearances
Souhaib Sa’ad in a still from a video released by the Defense Ministry
several weeks after his disappearance. His brother told Human Rights
Watch that Sa'ad was forced to repeat dictated confessions after being
tortured for 3 days.
(Beirut) – The case of eight men who could face
imminent execution following a military trial shows why
Egyptian
authorities should place a moratorium on the
death penalty, Human Rights Watch said today.
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The eight civilians, six of whom are in custody, were
sentenced to death on May 29, 2016, after a trial on
terrorism charges that denied them basic due process
rights and relied on confessions that the defendants said
were obtained under torture. If the Supreme Military
Court for Appeals denies the defendants’ appeal, the six
men in custody could be executed as soon as Defense
Minister Sedky Sobhi and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi
ratify their death sentences.
“Egyptian authorities have been using military trials to
dodge the already threadbare due process protections in
regular courts, and we fear these trials may become
rubber stamps for the death penalty,” said
Joe Stork,
deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“Military courts should never be used against civilians,
and they should certainly not be allowed to condemn
civilians to death.”
Sobhi should cancel the death sentences and order
military prosecutors to drop the case, and if there is
evidence against the men or their co-defendants, Egypt’s
prosecutor general should charge them in a regular
court, Human Rights Watch said.
Since 2013, military courts have sentenced at least 60
defendants to death in at least 10 cases. Six of these
sentences have been approved and carried out. While
military courts have handed down far fewer death
sentences than the hundreds issued by regular courts
since 2013, they do not provide even the limited due
process protections available in those courts. Egyptian
authorities have
tried more than 7,400 civilians
in
military courts since al-Sisi decreed a law in October
2014 that vastly expanded military court jurisdiction.
The
eight
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men
were
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among 28 tried together on terrorism charges. Only one
of the 28 was a member of the military. The court
sentenced 12 to life in prison, six to 15 years, and
acquitted two.
Military prosecutors alleged that the men had supported
or belonged to a group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood
that obtained explosives and weapons and plotted to
carry out surveillance and attacks on government and
security officials.
Human Rights Watch reviewed the military
prosecution’s 20-page indictment, a 149-page defense
memo, and the 37-page military court verdict. Human
Rights Watch also interviewed two defense lawyers, one
defendant who was sentenced to death but lives outside
Egypt, and relatives of five other defendants.
The relatives said that the authorities arrested the five
men between May 28 and June 2, 2015, and did not
provide information about their whereabouts for weeks.
The families inquired in local police stations and sent
telegrams to various government offices but received no
response. Some learned of their relatives’ whereabouts
weeks later, when they received calls from people who
saw the men in detention. The authorities did not
officially acknowledge that the men were being accused
of crimes until July 10, 2015, when some of the men
appeared
in a video
released by the Defense Ministry
that accused them of belonging to “the biggest terrorist
cell threatening national security.”
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Five of the men told their relatives that interrogators
had tortured them, including with beatings, electric
shocks, and hanging in painful stress positions. Three
said they were then forced to read confessions written
for them. Two told their relatives that the Defense
Ministry’s Military Intelligence and Reconnaissance
Department had held them in Cairo’s Nasr City
neighborhood, in a facility that Human Rights Watch
independently confirmed belonged to military
intelligence. None of the men were allowed access to
lawyers during their detention, interrogation, or initial
questioning by military prosecutors.
The men’s trial, known as Case 174 of 2015, began on
September 17, 2015. Military prosecutors charged the
defendants with manufacturing explosives, acquiring
defense secrets, possessing firearms, and violating
article 86 of the penal code – Egypt’s
primary anti-
terrorism statute.
The law provides for life
imprisonment or the death penalty for anyone who helps
lead a group that uses terrorism to “disrupt the
provisions of the constitution or laws, prevent state
institutions or public authorities from carrying out their
work, assault citizens’ personal freedoms or general
rights, or harm national unity or social peace.” Under
article 86, anyone who supplies such a group with
money, weapons, or explosives can also receive the
death penalty.
The indictment Human Rights Watch reviewed relied
entirely on the testimony of Major Hani Soltan, an
officer with military intelligence Group 77. Soltan
testified that on May 24, 2015, during a routine
inspection of troops returning from leave, military
personnel discovered a concealed camera pen in the
possession of a conscript assigned to the Defense
Ministry’s general secretariat. After interrogating the
man, Soltan testified, he was able to uncover the plot
and identify the members of the “terrorist cell.”
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Prosecutors did not charge any of the 28 defendants
with an act of violence but said the men were preparing
for attacks by stockpiling weapons and conducting
surveillance on security officials, including Gen. Medhat
al-Menshawy, the head of the Interior Ministry’s Central
Security Forces, who commanded the
brutal 2013
dispersal
of a mass sit-in in Cairo that left at least 817
protesters dead in one day.
In March and April 2017, Human Rights Watch sent
letters to six Egyptian institutions
including the
presidency and Defense Ministry, expressing serious
concerns about death sentences handed down in
military courts and urging al-Sisi and Sobhi not to
approve the death sentences in this case or another case
in which
seven men were sentenced to death by a
military court
in connection with a deadly explosion at
a stadium in Kafr al-Sheikh. Human Rights Watch also
said that Egyptian authorities should place a moratorium
on the death penalty in all regular and military courts in
view of the sharp rise in the number of death sentences,
turbulent political upheaval, and failure to pass a
comprehensive transitional justice law in Egypt since the
military removed the country’s first freely elected
president in July 2013.
In 2015, six men were executed following an unfair
military trial in which they were accused of participating
in attacks on security forces, including a gunfight that
killed army officers. In that case,
Human Rights Watch
determined
that three of the men could not have
participated in the attacks because authorities had
arrested them months earlier and they were in detention
at the time. Nevertheless, they were sentenced to death
and executed by hanging after Sobhi and al-Sisi ratified
their sentences.
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Military courts should never be used against
civilians, and they should certainly not be
allowed to condemn civilians to death. ”
Joe Stork
Deputy Middle East Director at Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all
circumstances as a punishment that is not only unique
in its cruelty and finality, but also inevitably and
universally plagued with arbitrariness, prejudice, and
error.
Egypt’s military courts violate several key elements of
due process, including the defendants’ right to be
informed of the charges against them, to access a lawyer,
to have a lawyer present during interrogations, and to be
brought promptly before a judge. Judges in the military
justice system are military officers subject to a chain of
command, without the independence to ignore
instructions by superiors.
The use of military courts to try civilians violates
international law. The Human Rights Committee, the
international expert body that interprets the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
which Egypt ratified in 1982, has stated that civilians
should be tried by military courts only under exceptional
circumstances and only under conditions that genuinely
afford full due process. The African Commission on
Human and Peoples’ Rights, which interprets the African
Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ratified by Egypt
in 1984, has stated that civilians should never face
military trial and that military courts should not have
the power to impose the death penalty. The African
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Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Fair Trial and
Legal Assistance, adopted in 2003, prohibit military trial
of civilians under all circumstances.
The Case Against the 28 Men
According to the indictment in Case 174 of 2015, the
investigation began when guards found a concealed
camera pen and flash memory in the possession of
Ahmed Magdi Nagi, a conscript assigned to the Defense
Ministry general secretariat, during an inspection on
May 24, 2015.
Major Soltan, the military intelligence officer,
interrogated Nagi and said that Nagi told him a man
named Khaled Ahmed al-Sagheer had recruited Nagi into
a terrorist cell tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-
Sagheer met Nagi through Nagi’s neighbor, Mohamed
Hamdi, on May 19, and the two met again four days later,
when al-Sagheer gave Nagi the camera pen and
instructions for conducting surveillance on military
officers and facilities.
Soltan testified that after arresting Nagi, he made Nagi
contact al-Sagheer and arrange a meeting near the
Qobba Bridge Hospital in Cairo’s Nasr City district,
where he promised to give al-Sagheer the camera pen
containing photos of his surveillance. After obtaining
permission from prosecutors, Soltan testified, he
arrested al-Sagheer following the meeting and found him
in possession of the pen and a second camera concealed
in a watch.
Afterward, Soltan said, al-Sagheer confessed to leading a
group within the cell responsible for surveillance, and
identified a man named Ahmed Amin Ghazali as the
cell’s leader. Soltan instructed al-Sagheer to arrange a
similar meeting with Ghazali in the nearby Qobba
Gardens neighborhood and arrested Ghazali as well.
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Through these arrests, Soltan testified, he was able
identify 25 other people who had either been members
of the cell’s three groups – for surveillance, weapons
manufacturing, and carrying out operations – or who had
assisted the cell. Soltan testified that the cell had plotted
to target General al-Shennawy, the Central Security
Forces commander; army Gen. Mohamed al-Assar, the
minister of military production; and Cairo University
President Gaber Nassar.
According to military intelligence Group 77 inspection
reports marked “secret” but included in the court files,
intelligence officers seized two concealed camera pens,
two flash memory drives, and a concealed camera watch.
One camera pen contained “unimportant” photos and
videos, while the other had three photos meant to “study
and observe the objectives” and four videos “filmed in
the streets possibly to observe the road to the target.”
An inspection report prepared by crime scene
investigators with the Interior Ministry’s Public Security
Agency, also included in the files, documented the
seizure of numerous weapons from the home of one of
the defendants, Abd al-Basir Abd al-Raouf, including one
FAL and one Kalashnikov assault rifle, two types of
shotguns, and three pistols. The report also stated that
the authorities had seized a Kalashnikov assault rifle
from Ghazali’s home.
A military engineers’ report included in the court files
documented the controlled destruction of what the
authorities alleged were homemade explosive devices
and other equipment seized from some of the
defendants. Defense lawyers told Human Rights Watch
that military prosecutors did not present any of the
seized weapons at trial, but that they also had not asked
them to do so.
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Soltan testified that two men living outside Egypt,
Ahmed Abd al-Basit, a former Cairo University doctoral
student, and Abdullah Nour al-Din, had founded and
funded the cell. He also said that the group was involved
in vandalizing police cars and electricity and
telecommunications towers but gave no details about
these operations or where, when, and how they were
carried out. In May 2016, the military court sentenced
Abd al-Basit, Nour al-Din, and Ghazali to death and
sentenced Nagi and al-Sagheer to life in prison.
The relatives who spoke with Human Rights Watch said
that only two of the defendants,
Souhaib Sa’ad and
Omar Ali,
had known each other before the case.
Military prosecutors did not charge Hamdi, the neighbor
who allegedly introduced al-Sagheer to Nagi, and the
presiding judge rejected the defense team’s request to
call Hamdi as a witness.
All five families said they had received no response to
their telegrams to the prosecutor general inquiring
about their relatives’ whereabouts. Human Rights Watch
examined several of the telegrams. In court, defense
lawyers requested that the prosecution present official
documents stating where the defendants had been held
after they disappeared, but prosecutors refused. The
presiding judge “was just like a silent watcher,” said one
relative, who was allowed to attend three court sessions
because he is a lawyer. Military judges also did not
respond to requests from defense lawyers to investigate
the defendants’ allegations of enforced disappearance
and torture, nor did the judges allow the defendants to
be examined by the Justice Ministry’s Forensic Medical
Authority, the lawyer said.
The families said they never received warrants from the
police authorizing their relatives’ arrests, either during
the arrest or afterward.
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Abd al-Basit, one of the cell’s two alleged founders, is
mentioned only once in the indictment, in a section that
summarizes the confession of Ghazali, the cell’s
purported leader, and states that Ghazali admitted to
receiving an unidentified amount of money from Abd al-
Basit. The prosecution’s file contains no evidence of this
money transfer. Defense lawyers stated in court that all
the defendants renounced their confessions and said
they had been obtained under torture. Abd al-Basit, who
was expelled from Cairo University in 2015 for
organizing peaceful protests against the military’s
removal of former President Mohamed Morsy and
human rights abuses by the security forces, and who
lives abroad, told Human Rights Watch that he believed
Ghazali had mentioned his name under torture because
they knew each other from the university.
Disappearances
Ghazali, 27, disappeared on the night of May 28, 2015, his
brother Ammar said. He said that a woman saw a group
of men pull Ghazali into a car near the Maadi metro
station in Cairo. When Ghazali resisted, his mobile
phone fell under a car parked in the street. The woman
picked up the phone after they left, called the last
number dialed and reached Ghazali’s family. She told
them what she saw and that she was going to get rid of
the phone because she did not want to get in trouble,
Ghazali’s brother said.
The next day, security forces in uniform and others
wearing civilian clothes came to their home with
Ghazali, who was blindfolded and handcuffed behind his
back, said his brother, whose family was there at the
time. The uniformed men broke into the apartment and
searched it, saying they said they were looking for guns,
but found nothing. They left and did not tell the family
where they were taking Ghazali.
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His brother said that the family visited every police
station in the Maadi neighborhood, as well as other
Interior Ministry facilities in Cairo, but none admitted to
having any information about Ghazali. The family sent a
telegram to the prosecutor general on May 30, but
received no response. After seeing the Defense Ministry
video on July 10, Ammar Ghazali visited military
prosecutors, who told him to look for his brother in
Cairo’s Tora Prison compound. When Ammar went
there, he discovered that the authorities were holding
Ghazali in the “Scorpion” Maximum Security Prison
inside the Tora compound.
Security forces arrested Mohamed Fawzy Abd al-
Gawwad, 24, an electrical engineer who had recently
graduated from Cairo University, on May 29, 2015, at his
apartment in the Helwan neighborhood of Cairo, his
father said. Several neighbors witnessed the arrest and
called Abd al-Gawwad’s father, who was traveling with
his wife to visit family in another city.
The father said that when they returned hours later, they
found that security forces had broken into their building,
destroying the metal door downstairs and their
apartment door. They had confiscated their son’s laptop,
mobile phone, and tablet, which the family received later
during the trial. The father began inquiring about Abd al-
Gawwad in local police stations, where officers denied
knowing anything about him. The next day, the family
sent a telegram inquiring about his whereabouts, a copy
of which Human Rights Watch reviewed, to the
prosecutor general, who did not respond.
On June 17, the father received a phone call from an
unknown person who said that he had seen Abd al-
Gawwad in Istikbal Prison inside Tora. When the father
went to Tora, officers told him he could visit his son in
15 days.
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Mahmoud al-Sherif Mahmoud, 30, a mechanical
engineer, disappeared on June 1, 2015, his father said.
Though the father did not witness the arrest, Mahmoud
told his father later that a group of men had taken him
from the street close to Cairo’s Helwan metro station.
His father said that security forces – including police,
Central Security Forces, and a man whom he believed
was an intelligence officer in civilian clothes – came to
search their home the day after Mahmoud’s
disappearance, without a warrant. The intelligence
officer told his group to search the house without
destroying any property.
“He was more polite than others,” the father said.
The next day, the family sent a telegram inquiring about
Mahmoud’s whereabouts, which Human Rights Watch
reviewed, to the prosecutor general but did not receive a
response.
Like Abd al-Gawwad’s family, Mahmoud’s family
received a call on June 17 from an unknown person who
said he had seen Mahmoud in the Tora prisons
compound.
On June 2, 2015, the day after Mahmoud’s
disappearance, police arrested Abd al-Basir Abd al-
Raouf, 20, then a first-year student at the Maritime
Academy, on the street near a department store in
Helwan, his mother said. She said that he was studying
for final exams at the time and had been going to a
friend’s house so they could study together. When his
mother tried to call him several times the next day, his
phone was off. Later that day, he called back and said he
had finished the exam but would stay with his friend for
a few days. There was no need to worry, he told her.
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On June 7, after Abd al-Raouf did not call or return
home, his mother sent a telegram to the prosecutor
general saying that her son had disappeared, but she
received no response. On June 15, a woman called the
family and said that she had seen Abd al-Raouf while
visiting her husband in Istikbal Prison inside Tora and
that he wanted them to bring him clean white clothes
instead of the prison’s standard white uniform. Later,
Abd al-Raouf told his mother that when he had called
her on June 3 and claimed to be with his friend, he was
actually in the custody of security officers, who allowed
him to make only that call.
Abd al-Raouf told his mother that two men in civilian
clothes had carried him into a civilian car and taken him
to Helwan Police Station where they held him for a night
before moving him to a place he could not identify. His
mother said that a few days after her son’s arrest,
someone came and searched their home while the family
was gone. When her other son went home to retrieve
some belongings, he found that the door was broken and
the apartment appeared to have been searched.
Notes made by the military prosecutor in the file
reviewed by Human Rights Watch stated that
prosecutors had ordered Abd al-Raouf arrested and
detained pending investigation on June 3, but his father
obtained a document from the Interior Ministry’s Prison
Administration Authority, which Human Rights Watch
also reviewed, stating that Abd al-Raouf had not been in
any of its prisons before June 13, the day when he and
other defendants said they saw military prosecutors for
the first time. The authorities were unable to account for
the 10 days in between, the period of Abd al-Raouf’s
forced disappearance.
Ahmed Mustafa Ahmed, 42, the owner of a small
workshop who lived in Cairo’s Manshiyat Nasr
neighborhood with his wife and four children,
disappeared around the end of May 2015, his brother,
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Walid, told Human Rights Watch. Walid Mustafa said
that the family did not know his brother’s whereabouts
for several weeks, and that he sent telegrams to the
prosecutor general and the Interior Ministry inquiring
about his brother but did not receive a response.
Later, Ahmed Mustafa told his brother that security
forces had taken him from his home, put him in his car,
and made him drive to work. The building guard told
Walid that the security forces had beaten his brother
severely during the arrest. Police searched his workshop
and destroyed many items, Walid Ahmed said. He said
that the police had confiscated a large amount of money
that Mustafa Ahmed had saved for his business and did
not take anything else from the home or the workplace,
except Mustafa Ahmed’s car, which they did not return
to the family.
Several weeks later, Walid Ahmed said, he was
“surprised one day when an unknown man called me and
said that my brother was in Tora Prison and that the first
visit would be in 11 days.”
In June 2015, Human Rights Watch
documented the
enforced disappearance
of Ali and Sa’ad, whom
security forces arrested on June 1, 2015, along with a
third friend, Esraa al-Taweel, outside a restaurant in the
Maadi neighborhood. Interior Ministry officials
repeatedly denied arresting them, but more than two
weeks later, relatives found Sa’ad and Ali in Tora Prison
and al-Taweel in al-Qanater Women’s Prison.
Prosecutors held al-Taweel in pretrial detention on
accusations of belonging to a terrorist group, but
after
widespread public pressure,
a court ordered her
release six months later on medical grounds. Al-Taweel
was not charged in case 174, but military prosecutors
alleged that Sa’ad and Ali belonged to the cell’s
surveillance group.
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Most of the relatives who spoke with Human Rights
Watch said that security forces kept the men blindfolded
and stripped to their underwear during their entire time
in custody, leaving them unable to identify their
detention site. But relatives of Abd al-Raouf and
Mahmoud said the men claimed they had been held in
the Nasr City military intelligence headquarters. Human
Rights Watch has independently confirmed that military
intelligence Group 77, to which Major Soltan belonged,
is located there.
Torture
The five families who spoke with Human Rights Watch
alleged that security forces tortured their relatives while
they were forcibly disappeared to make them sign
dictated confessions and read them out loud while being
videotaped. The Interior Ministry does not allow human
rights groups to interview prisoners, and the military
judges presiding over the case denied the defense team’s
request for the defendants to receive medical
examinations, so Human Rights Watch was unable to
independently confirm these accounts.
Abd al-Raouf’s mother said that when she first saw her
son, it was a “big shock,” and that he appeared
exhausted.
“I was crying and holding him and saying, ‘What
happened to you, what did they do to you, my son,’” she
said. Abd al-Raouf pointed at Ali, she said, whose mother
was visiting him, and indicated that Ali’s wrist was
almost broken. Abd al-Raouf told his mother “not to
worry.” During another visit, he told her that his
interrogators beat him severely while he was blindfolded
for 12 days and once kept him hanging from his wrists
for three days.
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Abd al-Raouf’s father said that his son told him his
interrogators shocked him with electricity and tortured
him psychologically by driving him into the desert on
one occasion and threatening to kill him. Abd al-Raouf’s
mother said he told her that his only desire during his
detention was for the torture to stop. He told her that
his interrogators eventually took him, blindfolded and
handcuffed, to a man he was told was a military
prosecutor.
The man asked Abd al-Raouf questions but wrote down
fabricated answers without waiting for Abd al-Raouf to
respond. He then asked Abd al-Raouf to sign a
document. Abd al-Raouf’s mother said he told her that at
one point, when he denied the prosecutor’s accusations
that he had possessed weapons, someone hit him in the
back with a gun and told him that nobody knew where
he was and that they could make him “another Islam
Atito.” The man was referring to a student
who
disappeared
from Ain Shams University in May 2015
and was later said by the Interior Ministry to have died
in a shootout with security forces.
Abd al-Raouf’s mother said that when he arrived at
Istikbal Prison, the prison doctor, inspecting him and
other detainees, refused to admit them without hospital
reports documenting their injuries, but that the prison
warden pressured him not to insist on this.
Ghazali’s brother Ammar said that when the family saw
him for the first time in prison, “he still didn’t
understand what was happening to him.”
“He was tortured in many different ways: Hanging from
hands and tying weights to his legs. When he was [let
down] he got immense pain. [They hit him] with a piece
of cloth soaked in a flammable liquid, and when he tried
to sleep later he couldn’t, because his back was so
inflamed,” his brother said.
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The day before recording the confession video, the
interrogators brought a paper to Ghazali and told him:
“You will read what is written on it [in] order to get out
of here, or you will stay with us,” Ammar Ghazali said.
Abd al-Gawwad was held completely naked, his father
said. “Anything you can think of happened to him. When
he fainted, they used to wake him up and torture him
again,” he said. “He was beaten and humiliated verbally
in all ways. When I saw him, he had dark skin on his
hands and wounds from ties and hanging.”
The father said that his son was forced to read his
confession from a piece of paper while the interrogators
videotaped him. He said that they recorded the
confession about 10 times, until they obtained a
recording that made it seem as if Abd al-Gawwad were
speaking naturally and not reading. He said Abd al-
Gawwad told him that he was so badly tortured he could
not raise his arms or legs to put clothes on and that the
interrogators had to dress him in a shirt and pants to be
filmed.
Walid Ahmed, the brother of Mustafa Ahmed, said his
brother told him that interrogators hanged him from his
wrists, gave him electric shocks on his genitals, deprived
him of sleep, and held him naked while pouring water on
him. When Walid saw his brother for the first time, he
seemed to have lost weight and have torture marks on
his hands.
“He wasn’t the brother I knew,” Walid Ahmed said of his
appearance. He said that when his brother tried to carry
his six-month-old daughter in one of the prison visits,
his hands were shaking so severely that he nearly
dropped her. He told his family that his interrogators
beat him severely when he asked to remove his blindfold
to identify a man his interrogators said was a prosecutor.
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The interrogators filmed his pre-written confession
between 10 and 15 times because his eyes kept dropping
down to read the confession paper, his brother said.
“I asked him how can you sign such confessions,” Walid
Ahmed said.
His brother responded: “I was dying … I was going to
die.”
He also told his brother that the interrogators
threatened to bring his wife and other family members
and rape them if he did not confess.
Mahmoud’s father said that Mahmoud told him that the
worst torture was the threat to arrest his family. But
Mahmoud also told his father the interrogators had
dragged him on the floor, handcuffed his hands behind
him and hanged him painfully from a door, beat him
with hoses, and shocked him with electricity repeatedly.
After Mahmoud’s arrest, intelligence forces arrested two
of his younger brothers separately, without charges, the
father said.
He said that the older of the two arrested brothers,
Moataz, disappeared for more than four months after
the military unit in which he served as an unenlisted
civilian laborer called him back from leave. The family
only discovered his whereabouts after they submitted a
special request to the commander of the air force. The
father said that authorities took Moataz to a military
intelligence office for a month and half and that
intelligence officers brought him to see Mahmoud while
both were in custody.
“When he saw Mahmoud, he was shocked, he thought he
was burned, his face looked like it was burned,” the
father said. He said that officers tortured both brothers,
including with beatings and cigarette burns. They then
 URU, Alm.del - 2016-17 - Bilag 241: Henvendelse af 24. juli 2017 fra Egypt Parliament Abroad om krænkelse af menneskerettighederne i Egypten
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sent Moataz back to his unit, where he spent two and
half months in custody and was later released after he
was discharged without any compensation, his father
said.
Several days after Mahmoud’s disappearance, security
forces raided their home for the second time, at about 11
p.m., breaking the door and taking away Mahmoud’s
youngest brother, who had secondary school exams at
that time.
“They threatened [Mahmoud] that they wouldn’t allow
his brother to take exams,” his father said. Around dawn
the next day, they released the brother. The father said
that a man from the local police station called him on
the phone and told him to come take his son, saying,
“We don’t need him anymore.” A few days later, they
received a phone call from an unknown individual
informing them that Mahmoud was being held in Tora
Prison.
Region / Country
Middle East/North Africa, Egypt
Topic
Detention Centers, Terrorism / Counterterrorism, Torture
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