Egyptian Authorities Disappear 3-4 People Daily, Amnesty International Says

A report from Amnesty International has turned the focus on alleged kidnapping and torture in Egypt of hundreds of students, political activists, protesters and even young teenagers during the past three years. “They vanish. Their family knows nothing about them, forced disappearances, held, torture practised in jails”, opined Riccardo Noury a spokesman for the charity. “Anyone who dares to speak out is at risk”, said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director.

The London-based human rights group said abuses had surged since the military overthrew the country’s first elected president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and unleashed a crackdown on both political Islamist and secular dissidents.

Relatives of detained prisoners, who claim their loved ones have been forcibly disappeared, protest and demand the release of their relatives in May in front of the Journalist’s Syndicate building, in Cairo.

Children were among those being kept at undisclosed locations for up to several months at a time “to intimidate opponents and wipe out peaceful dissent”, the report said.

Amnesty’s report features the detailed cases of 17 people subjected to enforced disappearance, who were held incommunicado for periods ranging between several days to seven months, cut off from the outside world and denied access to their lawyers or families or any independent judicial oversight.

Mazen Mohamed Abdallah, 14, was subjected to enforced disappearance last September and suffered horrific abuse, including being repeatedly raped with a wooden stick in order to force him to “memorise” a false confession.

Aser Mohamed, 14, was beaten, given electric shocks all over his body and suspended from his limbs in order to extract a false confession when he was forcibly disappeared for 34 days in January in National Security Agency offices in the 6th of October district of Greater Cairo.

The rights organization charged that Egyptian prosecutors were complicit in the practice by failing to investigate abuses and basing charges on confessions extracted under torture. The government has denied any kidnappings have taken place while the foreign ministry said in a statement Amnesty International reports are biased and politically-motivated. He said the ministry had looked into all suspected cases.

The National Council for Human Rights, the country’s official human rights watchdog, said on July 3 it had raised 266 cases of enforced disappearances with the interior ministry between April 2015 and the end of March.

As Leila points out, there have been regular disappearances like this in Egypt for more than a year now – and they appear created to scare government opponents.

Amnesty also criticised European governments and the USA, saying they “blindly supply security and police equipment to Egypt”, and “have appeared overly reluctant to criticise the deteriorating human rights conditions in Egypt”.

An worldwide rights group says Egyptian security authorities are using enforced disappearce as a tool to stifle dissent.

“Any objective reader can tell instantly that the organisation’s reports depend on sources that reflect the opinion of one side and people that are in a state of hostility towards the Egyptian government”.