The date of their trial has not yet been released. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi maintained that such cases of police abuse are “isolated incidents.” At least four prisoner deaths in police custody have been reported so far this month.
This week, a detainee at al-Aqrab prison, where prisoners started a hunger strike last week in protest of poor conditions, gave an account of the prisoners’ circumstances, stating, “some detainees have one blanket, others don’t; some only have one pair of pajamas to wear, we don’t even wear slippers, even our medication was taken from us.” According to prisoners, authorities beat hunger striking prisoners until several were sent [Ar] to intensive care. The sister of an al-Aqrab prison detainee, Salma Sahlob, said that she is unsure whether the brother may be among the injured detainees, and added that she has not been able to visit him for two months. Even her brother’s lawyer has been denied access to his client for the past three months. Her brother is being held on charges of killing two officers, though she insists that he was already in prison when the crime took place.
At the Journalists’ Syndicate’s protest in support of journalist detainees on Wednesday, activists chanted slogans such as, “freedom for every detainee” and “journalism is not a crime.” The mother of detained blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah, the head of the syndicate’s freedoms committee, and political activist and journalist Rasha Azab all joined other activists, journalists, and detainees’ families in protesting police abuses and poor treatment of prisoners. Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists joined the syndicate in drawing attention to the case of photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known as Shawkan, as his case goes to trial on December 12. He will face trial along with over 700 other defendents in the “Rabaa sit-in dispersal” case, after over two years in pretrial detention.
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