Egypt’s security apparatus is responsible for torturing prisoners and denying detainees basic legal rights, according to new testimony obtained by the Guardian.
Tarek “Tito” Hussein, a 24-year-old human rights lawyer recently kidnapped and unlawfully incarcerated by police for five weeks, has spoken about his experiences at the hands of the country’s interior ministry.
He accuses state officials of attempting to extract false confessions, denying prisoners access to legal counsel and practising violent interrogation methods including beatings and the use of electric shocks, all of which violate the Egyptian constitution and international law.
The allegations come days after Human Rights Watch released a detailed report that warns of a “torture epidemic” in Egypt under the rule of the military general turned president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. It says the scale of human rights abuses “probably amounts to a crime against humanity”.
Egypt’s foreign affairs ministry has dismissed the report as flimsy and an act of deliberate defamation.
The Guardian asked the Egyptian government to respond to Hussein’s specific accusations of mistreatment, but did not receive any answer by the time of publication.
Hussein’s nightmare began in the early hours of 17 June, when his family home in the small settlement of Kafr Hamza, north of Cairo, was disturbed by a knock at the door. His mother answered to find more than 50 heavily-armed police officers waiting in the street.
Hussein, a pro-democracy activist who rose to prominence after his teenage brother was jailed without charge for more than two years for wearing a T-shirt reading “Nation without torture”, asked to see an arrest warrant. “You know that’s not how things work now,” he said an officer replied.
Hussein disappeared into a Kafkaesque maze of legal bureaucracy and systemic violence for 42 days. He was moved between dozens of police stations, prison cells and courthouses across northern Egypt, often without his family having any idea of his whereabouts.
“If you have a dream of changing Egypt for the better, of living in a country where the rule of law is upheld and lawless violence by the state is rejected, then there is a price to pay,” Hussein said. “This regime believes fighting for your rights is a crime, but the real crime is what’s happening inside Egypt’s prisons.”
During his incarceration he was questioned repeatedly about his thoughts on the country’s 2011 revolution, his relationship with prominent opposition figures and articles he had written for international human rights organisations. He was initially not told the charges against him and was prevented from having contact with his lawyer.
When he was eventually brought before a prosecutor, he was charged with incitement against the state and membership of a banned organisation – the Muslim Brotherhood. The allegation was particularly absurd given that Hussein was a prominent opponent of the Islamist group under the presidency of Mohamed Morsi. A judge subsequently ordered his release on bail.
Security officers ignored the order, claiming that Hussein had outstanding legal charges against him in various locations across Egypt. The alleged cases involved activities such as illegal construction and cheque fraud, crimes supposedly committed in cities Hussein had never lived in and carried out when he was still a child.
Over the following weeks Hussein said he was held variously in solitary confinement, in an overcrowded cell with about 150 other prisoners and in a packed police truck parked outside in the summer heat. When Hussein became so ill that he began vomiting blood, no medical assistance was offered. He was told he had been sentenced to a year in jail, but not what crime he had been found guilty of.
Hussein said his worst experiences took place in a detention centre known as the work camp prison in Badr el-Beheira, a town west of the Nile delta. “From the moment I got there, it was clear that the procedures in this prison were particularly harsh and cruel,” he said. New arrivals were made to strip naked and face the wall while officers whipped them from behind with plastic hoses.
“Along the corridor we could hear the screams of people being tortured and the zap of electric shocks. Coming past us the other way were prisoners covered in blood,” he said.
“I’m a human rights lawyer, and my work is supposed to be defending people from this kind of brutality … It was the moment in my life when I truly understood what it means to be broken.”
Hussein Baoumi, Amnesty International’s Egypt campaigner, said Tarek Hussein’s ordeal echoed the larger human rights crisis engulfing Egypt, where a state of emergency is in place, unsanctioned protests are outlawed and several journalists have been jailed and hundreds of websites censored in crackdown on freedom of expression.
“The Egyptian authorities have targeted Tarek because he dares to defend victims of state violations, and because he dares to voice his opinions peacefully,” Baoumi said. “The degree of mistreatment and torture that he details is extremely alarming.”
The latest victim is one of Tito’s legal colleagues, Ibrahim Metwally Hegazy, the founder of the Association of the Families of the Disappeared, who was snatched a week ago while en route to a UN conference in Geneva on enforced disappearances.Amnesty released a report last year which estimated that the rate of forced disappearances in Egypt had grown so rapidly that the security forces were kidnapping an average of four citizens a day and holding them incommunicado.
Hegazy, who faces up to five years in prison, is associated with the investigation into the murder of Giulio Regeni, an Italian PhD student from the University of Cambridge whose body was discovered on the outskirts of Cairo last year.
Hussein is now out of prison, but several cases against him remain open and he knows that there could be another knock on the door at any time. In the meantime, he has vowed to continue his human rights work.
“It sounds romantic,” he said. “But carrying on is what gives the whole experience meaning. Egypt deserves more than this.”
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