Abdelrahman Attef Hussein, 20-year-old student at Al Azhar University

On 11 July 2015, Abdelrahman was in a street near Matareyah Square in Cairo where he was enjoying Iftar – the breaking-fast meal in Ramadan – with friends, when several cars suddenly stopped in front of them. According to testimonies, the policemen that came out of the cars immediately arrested the five young men and forced them into one of the cars that left for an undisclosed location. Unaware of his whereabouts, his relatives sent a telegram to the Attorney General of Cairo on 12 July 2015, which remained unanswered to date. Without news, his family fears that he could be ill-treated in detention, along with his four friends arrested with him.

Hani Said Kahla, 31-year-old employee of a water-filters company in Shubra El Kheima

On 19 August 2015, the Security Forces raided the apartment where Hani and two other employees of his company were staying, in the city of Shubra El Kheima in the outskirts of Cairo. The authorities had allegedly obtained this location after torturing another employee who would have told them that the three men were staying in this flat located in the firm's building. As a consequence, the three men were arrested and brought to an unknown location. Alerted the day after by a telegram from the family, the Public Prosecutor of Shubra El Kheima did not take any action and they remain unaware of his fate.

Hani's disappearance adds to numerous cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests that were reported in August 2015 in the governorate of Cairo, especially in the area of Shubra El Kheima. If the practice occurs across every Egyptian governorate, it seems particularly systematic in the region of Cairo, where the different security bodies continue to perpetrate wide-scale abductions in total impunity.

Left with no resort at the national level, both Abdelrahman and Hani's families turned to Alkarama who solicited the intervention of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) to ask the Egyptian authorities to release the two men or, at the very least to disclose their respective places of detention and authorise their relatives to visit them. Egypt must put an immediate end to the practice of enforced disappearances and launch thorough investigations and prosecutions into all reports of such practice being perpetrated by the security apparatus as enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 47/133 of 1992 on the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons From Enforced Disappearance.

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