Tag: ss
Resources on Egypt’s State Security Police
SS Police torturer acquitted
No justice for torture victims under Mubarak’s regime.
A Cairo court on Tuesday acquitted a state security officer of charges of torturing to death a man he had arrested in 2003, a judicial source said.
The court must publish within 45 days its reason for acquitting Captain Ashraf Safwat whose alleged involvement in the killing came to light earlier this year through Egypt’s activist Internet blogger community.
Back on Sept. 16, 2003, Safwat summoned Mohammed Abdel Qader and his brother to a Cairo police station. Abdel Qader died five days later and an autopsy said torture by electric shock combined with a weak heart was the cause of death.
In January, Abdel Qader’s case appeared on a blog, featuring excerpts from the forensic report and gruesome autopsy pictures.
“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.”
It took seven months for Safwat to answer the subpoena in the 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.
Qasr el-Nil Police Station: A History of Torture
Located in an old shabby villa in downtown Cairo’s most affluent area, Garden City, lies one of the infamous torture centers run by Mubarak’s pigs.
Qasr el-Nil Police Station have gained notoriety among Egyptian activists because of the involvement of its officers in the crackdowns on Kefaya’s demonstrations in Tahrir Sq, Talaat Harb Sq and Abdel Khaleq Tharwat St. The place has become synonymous with Major Samawa’l Abu Sehla, who helped kidnap leftist blogger Muhammad el-Sharqawi, who was later tortured and sodomized by Abu Sehla and State Security officer Sherif el-Qamati.
But the old building has also a long history of torture and death of detainees in custody, the Torture in Egypt Blog reminds us.
[Above: Police Major Samawa’l Abu Sehla, identified by Sharqawi to be his kidnapper, together with Sherif el-Qamati of State Security’s so-called Counter-Communism Bureau.]
[Above: SS Officer Sherif el-Qamati, who sexually abused Sharqawi]