Egypt targets its opponents abroad |
He believed that by fleeing Egypt, the ordeal of pursuit, repression, and enforced disappearance would come to an end, but the jailer’s hand still reached his wife and children.
“Ahmed Al-Gamal” (a pseudonym) said he was forced to leave the country after being sentenced to 15 years’ rigorous imprisonment in the case known in the media as the ‘Rabaa Al-Adawiya sit-in dispersal’ on 14 August 2013.
The charges brought against Al-Gamal included ‘joining a terrorist group, armed assembly, premeditated murder and sabotage of public facilities’, prompting him to flee the country, leaving his wife and children without a breadwinner.
From time to time, on a near-regular basis, Egyptian security forces raid the family’s home after midnight in a village in Giza governorate, near the capital, ransacking the apartment, confiscating family members’ phones, and threatening the wife with arrest, he said.
Since the military coup of 3 July 2013, which ousted the late president Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected civilian president, Egyptian authorities have persistently pursued his supporters, fabricated charges against them, and subjected their families and relatives to harassment and abuse.
Punishment by proxy
The pattern of ‘punishment by proxy’ is escalating through targeting the families and relatives of activists and opposition figures living abroad, via raids, arrests and enforced disappearances, in an effort to pressure or punish them for their views and activities. This practice effectively turns the families of dissidents into hostages of the Egyptian authorities, according to 19 Egyptian and international human rights orgnisations.
At 3 a.m., the child ‘Adel Mahmoud’ (a pseudonym) was placed in a cell at a police station in Fayoum governorate (central Egypt), in an attempt to pressure him into revealing where his father had travelled abroad, how the family remained in contact with him, and the source of their financial support, he told Middle East Monitor.
The list of victims includes many cases, most notably activist Saif Al-Islam Eid, host of the podcast Anbar Kullu Yisma‘, whose father, Al-Sayed Sobhi Eid (63), was arrested by National Security forces........