Tag: عماد الكبير

Egypt bloggers reveal new torture case

Posted on By 3arabawy

A report by AFP journalist Paul Schemm about the bloggers’ and rights activists’ campaign to prosecute State Security torturers:

Egypt bloggers reveal new torture case
by Paul Schemm
CAIRO, Feb 1, 2007 (AFP) – Egypt’s politically active blogger community has brought to light another torture case against the regime’s security services amid a rising tide of outrage over police brutality.
On Saturday, lawyers from the Association for Human Rights and Legal Aid (AHRLA) will go to court in a last-ditch effort to keep alive the case against a state security officer accused of torturing to death a man he arrested three and a half years ago.
The case against Captain Ashraf Safwat is gaining new attention following the decision by Egypt’s activist blogger community to post the details online in the wake of several other cases of police brutality in recent weeks.
“The most significant aspect of the case is this is the first state security officer to truly be put in front of a criminal court,” said Mohsen Bahnasi, a member of AHRLA’s board, referring to the country’s feared plainclothes security service.
Mohammed Abdel Qader and his brother were summoned to a Cairo police station on September 16, 2003 by Safwat. Abdel Qader died five days later and an autopsy gave torture by electric shock combined with a weak heart as the cause of death.
More than three years later, the case continues to drag on, hampered by slow prosecutors, uncooperative security services and now the family’s decision to drop the case and disappear.
In the past few months, however, torture cases have gained new prominence in Egypt as bloggers have posted videos, photos and accounts of brutality in police stations, prompting renewed investigations.
On January 20, Abdel Qader’s case appeared on a blog, featuring excerpts from the forensic report and gruesome autopsy pictures showing the mangled corpse of a heavily bearded man.
“There is evidence of the application of high temperature to the right and left breast and the penis resembling the effects of electrocution with an electric wire,” read an excerpt. “He was subject to those injuries hours before his death.”
“The pictures have done something, because they are visual — it is a shock,” said Aida Seif al-Dawla, a veteran anti-torture activist who credits the bloggers for raising public awareness on the pervasive use of torture by security services.
Hossam el-Hamalawy, on whose Arabawy blog the pictures appear, said it comes as no surprise bloggers should take interest in such cases.
“The bloggers themselves were victims of torture during the past years,” he said, referring to the case of Mohammed al-Sharqawi who was allegedly sodomised after being arrested. “We are receiving so many videos now.”
Bloggers came to public attention during the political ferment surrounding elections in 2005 and then most recently when they posted the grim video of bus driver Imad al-Kabir being sodomised in a police station in 2006 — the first of many such examples of police brutality to be publicised.
Interior Minister Interior Habib al-Adly last week lashed out at the bloggers, condemning the “intentionally unpatriotic campaign striking a national service that seeks stability in the country.”
The campaign strikes at the heart of official assertions that torture is not widespread and limited to individual cases.
“The outcry has encouraged people to come forward in person and take the government at its word that it takes torture seriously and prosecutes it whenever possible,” said Elijah Zarwan of Human Rights Watch.
Proving a torture case in Egypt, he added, is very difficult due to a narrow definition of torture by authorities and lengthy incommunicado detentions during which the marks often fade.
It took seven months for Safwat to answer the subpoena in the current case, and when he did it was with his own autopsy report claiming the burns came from a defibrillator used to revive the victim after a heart attack, indicating he was familiar with the case prior to the trial.
A special committee of experts then took two tries to conduct a new autopsy based on the pictures and available documents which finally concluded that there was torture, opening the way for the trial to begin in June 2006.
The repeated delays, leaking of information to defendants and allowing the suspected officers to remain free during the trial are typical of attempts to bring torture cases against police, said AHRLA president Tariq al-Khater.
“The prosecutors in Egypt are in collusion with the police,” he said.
In November, the officer’s lawyer suddenly produced a paper signed by Abdel Qader’s family withdrawing Khater’s power of attorney and dropping the civil case for damages against the officer.
Khater is convinced that state security pressured the family, which has since disappeared, by threatening their still imprisoned other son, Sameh.
With his case against Safwat threatening to fall to pieces, Khater has taken the unusual step of challenging the family’s decision on the behalf Abdel Qader’s three daughters on the grounds it is against their interests.
On Saturday, the criminal court will decide whether the case proceeds.

Torture banner

Al-Jazeera journalist to go on trial over torture documentary

Posted on By 3arabawy

I’m expecting a crackdown on bloggers and anyone who speaks about torture in Egypt soon:

Case of Al-Jazeera journalist accused of endangering Egypt’s national interest to go to trial
By NADIA ABOU EL-MAGD
Associated Press Writer
CAIRO _ Egypt has launched trial proceedings against a journalist for the pan-Arab Al-Jazeera Television accused of harming the country’s national interest, the state prosecutor’s office and the channel said Sunday.
The case is that of Howaida Taha, 43, Egyptian documentary producer for Al-Jazeera who was detained earlier this month after 50 videotapes were confiscated by police from her luggage at the Cairo airport.
Taha was held for over a day and interrogated about the footage which authorities said contained fabricated scenes of torture by Egyptian police.
Egyptian prosecutors accused Taha of “practicing activities that harm the national interest of the country” and of “possessing and giving false pictures about the internal situation in Egypt that could undermine the dignity of the country.”
Taha was later released on bail pending trial.
At the time, Taha told The Associated Press the footage she produced was created with actors for the purpose of a documentary film about police torture in Egypt and that she had “filmed with the authorities’ permission.”
Taha subsequently left for Qatar and is currently back in Doha, Hussein Abdel Ghani, the Al-Jazeera bureau chief in Cairo, said on Sunday.
No trial date has been set yet in Taha’s case, an official with the prosecutor’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to media. Taha, who will likely be tried in absentia unless she returns to Egypt for the proceedings, faces up to three years in prison if convicted.
Abdel Ghani has publicly defended Taha, saying that reconstructing scenes with actors _ such as in Taha’s footage _ is a well-known method in the production of documentaries.
Al-Jazeera is “not the only network to talk about (police) torture,” said Abdel Ghani, himself briefly detained by police for his coverage of terrorist attacks in Egypt last April.
Egyptian authorities have been increasingly sensitive about leaked videos showing citizens, both men and women, tortured in police stations. Rights groups say torture, including sexual abuse, is routinely conducted in Egyptian police stations.
The government denies systematic torture, but has investigated several officers on allegations of abuse. Some were convicted and sentenced to prison.
In November, several Egyptian bloggers posted a video depicting a man, naked from the waist down, being sodomized at a police station. The man was later identified as Imad el-Kabir, 21, a bus driver.
The case sparked a public uproar, and two police officers were jailed pending investigation into sexual assault allegations. However, el-Kabir was also imprisoned last week, for resisting authorities.
Egyptian Interior Minister Habib el-Adly told Egyptian state television on Friday that many in the country are “upset about … some videos, newspapers and some critics who were trying to increase the view of police hostility.”
“I consider this to be an intended unpatriotic campaign,” el-Adly said.
Several leading Egyptian human rights groups have said that Taha’s case was part of “an ongoing policy of terrorizing the voices that are revealing torture” in Egypt.
Al-Jazeera, watched by millions of Arab viewers, has extensively covered anti-government demonstrations and the activities of opposition groups in Egypt, as well as terrorist attacks against the U.S. ally.
But the channel has also been accused of bias by Washington and encountered problems in several Arab countries. Its reporters have been barred by Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.
Accusations that Egypt is imposing severe freedom of speech restrictions have mounted recently.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch on Saturday demanded that authorities drop all charges against blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, on trial since earlier this month. Nabil, 22, was arrested in November for denouncing Islamic authorities and criticizing President Hosni Mubarak on his Arabic-language blog. He faces up to nine years in prison if convicted.

And here’s an AP report, also by Nadia Abou El-Magd, on blogger Kareem’s trial:

Egyptian court refuses to release on bail a blogger accused of sectarian strife and insulting Islam
CAIRO (AP) _ An Egyptian court refused Thursday to release on bail a blogger who is on trial on charges of insulting Islam and causing sectarian strife for his Internet writings in Egypt’s first prosecution of a blogger.
Abdel Kareem Nabil, 22, who has been in detention since his arrest in early November, often denounced Islamic authorities and criticized Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his Arabic-language blog. He faces up to nine years in prison if convicted on the charges.
In a statement Thursday, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, called on human rights groups to “pressure the government to drop charges against (Nabil) as a prisoner of conscience.”
Two U.S. congressmen also expressed deep concern about the arrest of Nabil _ who also goes by the blogger name of Kareem Amer _ and called for the charges to be dropped.
“The Egyptian government’s arrest of Mr. Amer simply for displeasure over writings on the personal weblog raises serious concern about the level of respect for freedoms in Egypt,” Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, and Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank wrote in a letter to Egypt’s U.S. ambassador, Nabil Fahmy.
The Bush administration has not commented on Nabil’s trial, unlike its criticisms of other arrests of Egyptian rights activists in past years.
In 2005, the Bush administration made Egypt _ which Mubarak has ruled unquestioned for a quarter century _ the centerpiece of what it called a policy priority of promoting democratic change in the Arab world.
But Egyptian reformists say Washington has all but dropped its pressure on Mubarak amid a need for his support on Iraq and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The United States was also spooked when Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood made big gains in 2005 parliamentary elections and the radical Hamas movement won 2006 Palestinian elections _ raising fears that greater democracy would increase fundamentalists’ power, activists say.
Nabil, whose trial began Jan. 18, has been charged with inciting sedition, insulting Islam, harming national unity and insulting the president.
In Thursday’s session, his lawyers requested he be released on bail during the trial, but the court rejected the motion, Nabil’s lawyer Ahmad Seif el-Islam said.
In his blog, Nabil was a fierce critic of conservative Muslims and in particularly of al-Azhar, one of the most prestigious religious institutions in the Sunni Muslim world.
Nabil was a law student at al-Azhar University, but denounced it as “the university of terrorism,” accusing it of promoting radical ideas and suppressing free thought. Al-Azhar “stuffs its students’ brains and turns them into human beasts … teaching them that there is not place for differences in this life,” he wrote. He was thrown out of the university in March.
In other posts, Nabil described Mubarak’s regime as a “symbol of dictatorship.”

New questions raised about human rights record of US ally

Posted on By 3arabawy

The San Francisco Chronicle covered El-Adly Video-Gate, and how Mubarak’s participation in the US-sponsored “extraordinary renditions” program (whereby Cairo receives Islamist suspects, and interrogate them under torture on behalf of the US) is giving the regime a sense of immunity from prosecution:

Torture video stirs fury over Egypt penal system
New questions raised about human rights record of U.S. ally
Joseph Krauss, Chronicle Foreign Service
Monday, January 22, 2007
Cairo — The man in the video lies on the floor on his back, naked from the waist down, with his feet hoisted into the air, surrounded by pairs of anonymous black boots.
The camera captures an act of brutality before zooming in until the man’s face, scrunched with agony, fills the frame. He cries out for mercy from his tormentors, but within seconds the words give way to screams of desperation. The abuse continues, and the camera holds steady.
The rare footage, shot on a cell phone camera inside a Cairo police station in January 2006, is the most striking evidence to date of what Egyptian and international human rights organizations have long called an epidemic of torture in the country’s penal system.
The video, which appeared on YouTube in November and quickly made the rounds of the local blogosphere, has sparked outrage in recent weeks, casting a harsh light on the deteriorating human rights situation in one of the United States’ closest allies in the Arab world.
The United States gives Egypt around $2 billion annually in military and development aid, and the Bush administration has come to see it as a crucial Sunni Arab ally in its escalating conflict with Iran. In recent years, Egypt has also emerged as a prime destination for “extraordinary rendition” — the controversial U.S. policy of kidnapping suspected terrorists and secretly sending them to be imprisoned and interrogated in countries that are known to practice torture.
Torture in Egyptian prisons has a long history, but human rights experts say Egypt’s participation in extraordinary rendition gives it an unspoken immunity from international criticism.
“Some countries, including the United States, are involved in torture and are benefiting by having Egypt assume the role of interrogating suspects,” said Bahey El Din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. “They can’t send people here to be tortured and then take a stand against it.”
In 2005, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif said the United States had sent 60 to 70 Egyptians back to their home country for interrogation, including Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Islamist preacher who goes by the name of Abu Omar.
Abu Omar was kidnapped in 2003 near his home in Milan and flown to Egypt, where he remains imprisoned without any formal charges lodged against him. His case sparked outrage in Europe, and an Italian court is trying 25 CIA agents and a U.S. Air Force officer — in absentia — along with nine Italian secret service agents for their participation in the kidnapping.
In November, Abu Omar smuggled out of prison an 11-page handwritten letter in which he described the abduction and the torture he had received since being brought to Egypt. According to the Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the letter, he claimed to have lost hearing in one ear as a result of repeated beatings and described being strapped to an iron device known as the “Bride” before being shocked with electric stun guns.
Montasser el-Zayat, his lawyer, said that although the authorities are no longer physically torturing Abu Omar, he continues to endure psychological torture from being held in solitary confinement with few visitors, and that he has tried to kill himself on three occasions.
El-Zayat, who has represented several prominent Islamists, said Abu Omar was never affiliated with any al Qaeda or any other organization. “He was only an activist, and he delivered Friday sermons in the mosque,” el-Zayat said.
While high-profile suspects have attracted the most attention, experts say the majority of torture victims in Egypt are, like the man in the video, ordinary citizens without political affiliations and that torture, once reserved for political dissidents and Islamist militants, is now applied across the penal system.
After the video surfaced, a local newspaper identified the victim as Imad Al-Kabir, a microbus driver who was brought in after intervening in an argument between his cousin and two plainclothes police officers. Al-Kabir was not accused of anything at the time, and he has said the police filmed the incident and sent the clip to local microbus drivers merely to humiliate him and to intimidate others.
“Torture has become endemic to Egyptian prison facilities, detention centers and police stations,” said Elijah Zarwan, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch in Cairo. “That the police videotaped everything and then circulated it among the public shows that they know they can get away with this sort of thing. It’s yet more evidence of a culture of impunity.”
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights documented 34 cases of torture in 2005 and 27 in 2006, but Zarwan and other human rights advocates insist that many if not most cases go unreported.
Although the worst forms of torture are usually reserved for suspected terrorists, the abuse of prisoners is more often aimed at collective punishment and intimidation than intelligence-gathering, said Dr. Magda Adly, director of the Nadim Center, which counsels and treats victims of torture.
“Torture sends a message not only to the victim and the victim’s family, but to the whole society, and that message is that if you speak out, you will never see the sun again,” she said.
On Jan. 15, the center, which sees an average of 70 new cases of torture each year, submitted a list of 189 names of suspected torturers, compiled primarily from the testimony of victims, to the Interior Ministry.
Egyptian bloggers have also taken up the cause and, in recent months, have published several videos showing the abuse of prisoners. The most recent shows a young woman suspended by her hands and knees from a pole between two chairs, confessing to murder and screaming that her hands are about to break off. The woman’s identity remains a mystery, but the Interior Ministry says it is investigating the matter.
The Imad Al-Kabir video, however, remains the most graphic, and has sent shock waves through the local human rights and activist community. After a local newspaper located and identified Al-Kabir, human rights lawyers persuaded him to identify his tormentors and take the case to the public prosecutor, who has since detained two of the officers involved and scheduled a trial for the first week in March.
But what at first seemed like a triumph for human rights advocates turned into a potential nightmare earlier this month, when the same court sentenced Al-Kabir himself to three months in prison for “resisting authorities.”
“We wanted the video to be seen so that the criminals in it could get the punishment they deserved, but so far that hasn’t happened,” said Wael Abbas, one of the first bloggers to publish the video. “Instead, the victim has been punished.”
Egyptian law narrowly defines torture as acts carried out against suspects during interrogation. Since Al-Kabir was not, at the time he was tortured, accused of any crime or in the process of being interrogated, it’s unlikely that the officers will be found guilty.
The Interior Ministry, which is in charge of Egyptian security services, has denied it practices torture, and some officials have accused Abbas and other bloggers of defaming the country’s image by putting the videos on the Internet instead of taking them directly to the ministry.
Human rights experts say the government is more interested in protecting its image than in addressing the problem of torture.
“Everyone in the human rights community agrees it is a huge problem, not only in the police stations but in the entire penal system, but nothing is being done because the government refuses to recognize it,” said Hassan, of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. “It’s grown into a cancer, and the government treats it like a mild headache.”