This could well be an article from The Onion. Police General Samir Salam, Assistant to the Interior Minister for Prison Affairs, denied there were secret prisons in Egypt, and added that “There is nothing called torture in Egypt.”
Tag: prisons
Third MB detainee in critical condition denied treatment
From the Daily Star Egypt:
A third detained member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has been admitted to the intensive care unit at Manial University Hospital after developing a serious heart condition in Tora prison, but prison officials have denied him access to treatment, the group said in a statement.
Hassan Zalat, who is one of 40 Brotherhood members currently being tried before a military court on charges of money laundering and membership of a banned organization, was admitted to intensive care and put on a respirator after his health deteriorated inside the prison.
Brotherhood sources say that Zalat suffers from high blood pressure and clogged arteries and may require bypass surgery. Manial University Hospital says it does not have the resources to treat him.
His family has requested that he be moved to a more specialized hospital for the surgery and has offered to pay the full cost, but prison officials have so far refused to approve the transfer.
“Zalat is supposed to have open-heart surgery, but the regime won’t allow it,” said Ibrahim El Houdaiby, board member of ikhwanweb.com, the MB’s official website.
“He has been sick for a long time — when they arrested him back in February he had just had a heart operation,” he added. “He was arrested out of his bed and carried in to the police truck [wrapped] in blankets.”
Zalat is the third Brotherhood detainee to develop serious health problems while in prison, and in all three cases there have been complaints that the state is denying prisoners proper medical care.
Witness in Egypt’s Nour case found hanged in jail
From Reuters:
One of the key witnesses and defendants in the trial of Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour was found hanged in his prison cell in central Cairo on Thursday morning, security sources said.
Ayman Ismail Hassan, who during Nour’s trial retracted his testimony against the politician, hanged himself with a sheet in the prison where he was serving a five-year sentence on a charge of forging documents, they added.
Hassan said he had made up his testimony under pressure from state security police, who had threatened members of his family.
“I confessed to forgery under pressure from officers from state security,” Hassan told reporters on June 30, 2005, after his lawyer told the court he had changed his plea to not guilty.
The court disregarded his retraction and went on to sentence both Ayman Nour and Ayman Hassan to five years in prison.
Nour, who came a distant second to President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s first multi-candidate presidential elections in September 2005, says the authorities fabricated the case against him to exclude him from politics.
The charge against Nour was that the endorsements he submitted to the authorities when he set up his liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) Party in 2004 contained forged signatures.
Gameela Ismail, Nour’s wife and a party official, said that Hassan, who was in his late 30s, was being held alongside prisoners who had been condemned to death and had complained to his family of mistreatment in prison.
“He kept telling them that he had important information to give to the public prosecutor,” she told Reuters.
PARTY VOLUNTEER
Amir Salem, the lawyer who defended Nour in the trial and who has been trying to secure his release on health grounds, told Reuters: “He (Hassan) was the only person taken alone and put in the Appeals prison (in central Cairo), and according to his family he complained constantly of ill treatment.”
“He was the only person in the Ayman Nour case who insisted on retracting his statements against Ayman Nour, and he admitted twice in front of court that all his statements were contrived,” Salem said. “(The judge) refused to pay attention.”
Hassan had already served almost two years of his sentence, plus months in pre-trial detention. Prisoners in Egypt typically leave jail after serving two thirds of their time.
Gameela Ismail said Hassan originally came to the party as a volunteer, offering to recruit members. He was a laborer and a bachelor who looked after his sisters and his nieces, she added.
Nour was sentenced on Dec. 24, 2005, and the Egyptian government has rejected repeated U.S. appeals for his release.
In his absence the liberal and secular party he founded has struggled to survive.
Nour, 43, the most influential non-Islamist politician opposed to the Mubarak family, won 8 percent of the vote in the presidential elections of 2005, against 89 percent for Mubarak. Human rights groups say the elections were seriously flawed.
Political analysts said the government wanted him out of the way so that the Mubaraks can prepare for the installation of Mubarak’s son Gamal, who is also 43, as the next president. Gamal denies having presidential ambitions.