Pigs in plain clothes raided the office of Kefaya activist Muhammad el-Ashqar.
Tag: kefaya
Police crack down on Kefaya protest; activists detained
I received those tweets from Nora, and here is a report by Sarah Carr:
A protest planned to take place in front of the People’s Assembly was banned yesterday by state security bodies.
According to Hesham Fouad, a member of the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists’ Syndicate, the protest was planned by the Committee for the Defense of Prisoners of Conscience, which he described as a popular movement not tied to any organization.
Fouad said that the Committee is headed by Kamal Abu Eida of the Karama political party and Muhammad Abdel Qoddous, a journalist who is also head of the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists’ Syndicate.
The protest was against the new anti-terrorism law which the government is currently in the process of drafting.
It is widely rumored that the law will replace the 27 year-old, continually renewed state of emergency that ends on May 31.
There was a heavy presence of central security troops and plain-clothed policemen in downtown Qasr El-Eini Street, which borders the People’s Assembly, when Daily News Egypt arrived.
Daily News Egypt saw Abdel Qoddous surrounded, and then forcibly removed from his position opposite the gates of the PA by five plain-clothed men.
It was not possible to ascertain where Abdel Qoddous was taken as a plain-clothed man demanded that that Daily News Egypt reporters leave in the opposite direction to that taken by Abdel Qoddous.
The journalist’s mobile phone is currently switched off preventing Daily News Egypt from establishing his whereabouts.
State-owned ISP blocks Kefaya website
From AFP:
A government-owned internet service provider has blocked the website of a leading opposition movement, a rights group said Monday, in the latest crackdown on the country’s cyber dissidents.
“The website for the Egyptian Movement for Change — Kefaya has been blocked in Egypt [for] users who have access to the internet through TE-Data … since May 4,” the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo) said in a statement.
TE-Data, a branch of Telecom Egypt and the largest internet service provider (ISP) in Egypt, is controlled by the Egyptian government.
The censorship came as Egypt seeks to promote its information and communication technology industry by hosting the International Telecommunication Union conference, which President Hosni Mubarak opened on Monday.
“The website is performing normally with other ISPs, but the technical supervisor of the website informed us that the TE-Data Co. blocked Kefaya website through the IP address,” Kefaya website editor Samir Gad told HRinfo.
Read the full HRINFO statement here.