Human rights activists have slammed Egypt’s security forces for resorting to “extrajudicial killings” and “torture” in dealing with dissidents amid the silence of the military-backed government in Cairo.
“Practices of forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and torture are on the rise,” said Sherif Mohy Eldeen, a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, told the Associated Press.
Rights activists say abuses are an intentional tool used by all levels in the security forces.
Mohy Eldeen said Egyptian police officers “act with total impunity,” while certain Egyptian officials publicly encourage such brutal actions.
In the latest case of police abuse, the bullet-ridden body of a young government engineer was handed over to his family in late January.
It came weeks after masked police forces stormed his workplace and took him away hand-cuffed as his co-workers were watching
The family of the 32-year-old Mohammed Hamdan searched for him for 15 days following his mid-January arrest in the southern city of Beni Suef only to be “told by every official that he was never arrested.”
According to the AP report, police authorities gave an entirely different account of the incident, claiming that Hamdan had been killed in gun-battle during a police raid on a farmhouse where he was hiding.
Police alleged that Hamdan was a Muslim Brotherhood member and had taken part in the killings of police officers in the past.
“They arrested him, killed him, sent the body to the morgue, wrote the report, sealed the case and gave me a body to bury,” said Hamdan’s father Qenawi Hamdan, adding, “I can’t fight the government.”
Human Rights Watch in January criticized the “heavy-handed response” to dissent in Egypt, saying the government “has made it clear dissenting opinions will be crushed.”
“Egypt’s government should learn from the country’s own decades-long experience that grinding oppression can plant seeds for future upheaval,” the group’s deputy Middle East director, Nadim Houry, said.
Police abuses were one of the complaints fueling the 2011 uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak. His elected successor Mohammed Morsi was removed by the military in 2013 and was replaced by the head of the military Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Some 1,400 people have so far been killed in the clampdown on Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters.
The Egyptian Association for Rights and Freedoms says at least 314 people in 2015 and 35 people this year were subjected to “forced disappearances,” in which police detain a person in secret.
Since the ouster of Morsi, thousands of anti-government protesters, mostly Brotherhood supporters, have been sentenced to jail by civilian and military courts.
The ousted president himself and several leaders of his now-banned Muslim Brotherhood movement have already been sentenced to death
Source: Islamic News Daily
