As Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s mother remains on hunger strike, supporters say activist’s continued detention is campaign of vengeance by Egypt’s president…
Mahmoud Shalaby, a researcher at Amnesty International says: “The whole thing is about making an example of him. He’s already been brutally punished. He has spent almost 10 years in prison solely for practising his human rights.
Peter Beaumont and Mahmoud Ahmad
Family, friends and supporters of the jailed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah have spoken about the conditions of his long imprisonment as his mother, Laila Soueif, remains in a London hospital in declining health on a hunger strike to secure his release.
Amid a mounting campaign to put pressure on British ministers to intervene more forcefully on Abd el-Fattah’s behalf, supporters say his continued detention is part of a campaign of vengeance motivated by the personal animus of the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, towards him.
The activist, who came to prominence during Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square protests, has been jailed twice, the second time months after his release from prison in 2019, and continues to be imprisoned despite completing his five-year sentence last autumn.
Abd el-Fattah’s first period in prison – from 2015 to 2019 – and part of his second was spent in the Tora maximum-security prison, a place designed to hold violent jihadists, but since 2022 he has been held in Wadi al-Natrun in Beheira province in the Nile delta.
With the harshest conditions in Tora – where Abd el-Fattah was beaten – his regime was also designed deliberately to isolate and demoralise him, say supporters, depriving him for three years of books and limiting his contact with other prisoners.
Between September 2019 to May 2022 he was held in a small, poorly ventilated cell, denied a bed and mattress as well as reading materials and exercise. “The idea was to crush his spirit,” says Mona Seif, his sister, who has visited her brother in jail. “I think after so many trials and attempts to break him, the regime has realised that the way crush to him is to isolate him from the world and render him mute. That’s been the tactic since his second period in jail beginning in 2019.”
What has become clear to Seif, and others campaigning to release him, is that the treatment of her brother is being driven by a very personal animosity directed at Abd el-Fattah and his family by Egypt’s president. “It seems very personal,” says Seif. “Since 2019 the unofficial messages we have been getting from different Egyptian institutions is that our file is with Sisi.”
Abd el-Fattah was a familiar and always approachable figure in Tahrir Square during the 2011 mass protests that led to the fall of the government of Hosni Mubarak. Articulate, passionate and thoughtful, his great skill was seen in bringing different groups together….
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