The head of the Egyptian Wrestling Federation, Maj. Gen. Mohamed Mahmoud assured the public on Friday that the Egyptian ambassador and Sports Minister are trying to secure Sayed’s release. Still, he sadly expressed that, unlike Egypt, you could not get someone out of detention in France using connections! The wrestler was eventually released the following day.

Yet, the story had already taken an even more Orwellian turn. The Egyptian Olympic officials declared they’d investigate Sayed, and the Egyptian Olympic Values Committee will look into his case. Who runs this “values committee”? It is Maj. Gen. Sherif el-Komaty, a former State Security Police [SS] officer accused by dissidents of torture, including one infamous case in 2006 when a leftist blogger accused Komaty of raping him in custody.

At the beginning of the 2000s, Komaty (or Qamati) worked for the SS Counter-Communism Bureau (Maktab Mukāfaḥit al-Šīūʿiyya), which is tasked with monitoring and cracking down on leftists and human rights organizations (whose ranks are filled with left-leaning or former communist activists). His pseudonym at the time was “Sherif el-Damati.”

I first spotted Komaty as early as 2003, when he began showing up for pro-Palestine and anti-Iraq war protests in downtown Cairo, in the company of the infamous torturer SS Lt. Colonel Waleed el-Dessouqi, both seen below in the picture I took in a Palestine solidarity protest, 28 September 2003.

Komaty was one of the SS officers involved in the crackdown and trial of Revolutionary Socialist activists in 2003-4. At the time, he held the rank of SS Captain. Over the following years, he ritualistically attended our Kefaya protests in downtown Cairo, monitoring activists with his cold, glassy eyes, together with other infamous SS officers like Ahmad el-Azzazi and Amr Mohsen, seen in the picture below.

During the 2006 “Cairo Spring,” when thousands of Egyptians took to the streets in solidarity with reformist judges, Komaty participated in the crackdown. On 25 May 2006, Komaty, with the help of the police force of Qasr el-Nil Station, kidnapped and brutally tortured left-wing blogger Mohamed el-Sharqawi. Sharqawi accused Komaty of raping him in custody. Komaty was never held accountable despite repeated calls from local and international rights watchdogs.

Komaty continued to attend and monitor leftist protests throughout 2007, where I repeatedly spotted and photographed him.

Then he suddenly disappeared. He could be seen no longer in protests. I don’t know which posts he held in the following years, but at least as of 2008, Komaty was still part of the SS and held the rank of Major, according to one of his relatives’ obituary published in Al-Ahram.

Komaty’s father, Mahdi, worked for the State Radio & TV in Maspero and was a staunch supporter of the Mubarak regime. Following the 2011 revolution, students at the institute where he taught organized protests demanding his removal and accused him of abusive treatment against the students and the employees and occasionally using his son’s SS connections to threaten them.

In recent years, I came across news of Komaty, this time holding the rank of Brigadier General and running the rowing team at the elite Maadi Sports Club. As of 2023, he was (and still is) the vice president of the Egyptian Rowing Federation.

Now, in 2024, Komaty has been promoted to the rank of Major General and entrusted by the regime with overseeing the “values” of the country’s Olympic athletes and will lead an investigation into a sexual assault by one of its top wrestlers.

The industrial action will last for ten days, and is backed by the Press Syndicate head Khaled el-Balshy.

The journalists already went on one-day and three-day strikes in the previous months.

Hossam el-Hamalawy, a journalist and activist who played a key role in the revolution of 2011, well remembers the mood among the Egyptian left.
“Most of the left-wing organisations in Egypt regarded Islamists as fascists. They lumped the Muslim Brotherhood and radical jihadis in one basket and used to claim the relationship between the two is a division of labour,” he said. “One could excommunicate and the other would assassinate.
“The left supported not just Rabaa, but all the killings that happened after the coup. They framed it as a war on fascism. Some of them came up with the rationalisation that it was two wings of the counter-revolution fighting each other. ‘It’s not our fight, so let them finish each other off’.”
But that is not what happened. After the generals had finished off the Brotherhood, they turned their fire on the left, and they soon ended up in the same cells as the Brotherhood. Some paid for their support of the military with their lives. Others languish in prison to this day.
“History will never forgive them. And I don’t think that any of them actually has issued a statement of apology for their position regarding Rabaa,” Hamalawy told Middle East Eye in an extended interview from his new home in Berlin.
“And the sad thing is that if they had their time again, they would repeat the same mistake.”