16 December 2015

Egypt: "Isolated Incidents?" − Torture and Ill-Treatment Continue Unabated in Tora Prison

Student Mahmoud Talaat Abdelhamid Student Mahmoud Talaat Abdelhamid

On 8 December 2015, the prison personnel of Tora prison violently repressed a hunger strike launched by several prisoners to protest the denial of their medication and the harshness of their conditions of detention, forcing the urgent hospitalisation of several of them. Among the hunger strikers was 22-year-old engineering student from Cairo University, Mahmoud Talaat Abdelhamid, who, although his foot was broken during the prison crackdown, was denied the right to see a doctor. Arrested on 30 June 2015, Mahmoud was secretly detained for the first two months of his detention, during which he experienced the worst forms of torture because of his alleged political affiliations. Now detained in Tora prison, Mahmoud remains at high risk of torture, which prompted Alkarama to send an urgent appeal on 15 December 2015 to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture (SRT) in the hope that this UN Special Procedure could help guarantee his physical and mental health.

On 30 June 2015, the 22-year-old student was helping his father at his household articles shop, located in the eighth district of Nasr City, in the outskirts of Cairo, when two minibuses stopped in front of the shop letting several masked Homeland Security officers out. Breaking objects in the shop, they arrested Mahmoud and forcibly took him to an unknown destination. Still unaware of his whereabouts two days later, his relatives, fearing for his life, solicited both the General Prosecutor and Cairo's Public Prosecution, but to no avail.

In fact, Mahmoud was secretly detained in the Lazoghly State Security facility in Cairo where he was repeatedly tortured. Hanged by the hands, he was electrocuted and beaten up on his entire body, with a view to force him to confess to crimes that he did not commit, a frequent practice in Egypt, as could testify three young brothers arbitrarily detained for months and tortured on several occasions before being sentenced in absentia in January 2015. Following his ordeal, Mahmoud was brought to the State Security Prosecution, which charged him with "affiliation to an outlawed group" and finally made his detention official on 1 September 2015. This is when he was transferred to the Al Aqrab high-security section of Tora prison − a detention centre where many detainees have died in the past few months and that recently faced criticism for denying prisoners their basic rights − where he remains detained to date.

"While the authorities launch symbolic prosecutions of officers accused of torturing citizens, they do not address the root-causes of torture, leaving prison personnel, security, police and other forces resort to this practice as a means of dissuasion, intimidation, political revenge, harassment and eventually to obtain false confessions," explained Thomas-John Guinard, Alkarama's Legal Officer for the Nile Region. On 7 December 2015, commenting on the recent investigation opened into the case of a 22-year-old man who would have died under torture in a police station, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said there would be no leniency in cases of torture, which he described as "isolated incidents."

This statement comes in stark contrast with the findings of Alkarama's latest report entitled Death Behind Bars: Torture and Denial of Medical Care in Detention and published on 4 November 2015, which shows that cases of death in detention more than trebled in the past two years. Alkarama's report documents 323 cases of deaths that occurred in detention between August 2013 and September 2015, including dozens of deaths that resulted from torture and for which the perpetrators were not prosecuted, first and foremost because Egyptian law does not appropriately address the issue of torture, and because the authorities favour a state of impunity for the torturers.

In order to remedy to Mahmoud's situation, his relatives turned to Alkarama, which sent an urgent appeal to the UN SRT asking him to intervene with the Egyptian authorities to guarantee his health and promptly, impartially and independently investigate his reports of torture. It is high time that the Egyptian authorities abide by their international obligations under the Convention against Torture (UNCAT) that they ratified in 1986, abolish this practice and provide support and compensation to the victims.

For more information or an interview, please contact the media team at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (Dir: +41 22 734 1008).

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