Egypt jails mom after torture claim

CAIRO — A mother who angered Egyptian authorities by accusing the police in a foreign news report of torturing her daughter has been arrested and was ordered detained Friday, while the human-rights lawyer who first publicly mentioned the mother’s detention has disappeared.

The public prosecutor ordered the detention of Mona Mahmoud Mohammed, known as Oum Zubeida, for 15 days pending investigations into her statements made in the BBC report. The report, which was posted online and televised a week ago, addressed torture and forced disappearances under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

The moves are the latest episode in Egypt’s ongoing assault on free speech and the media, which most recently has focused on foreign journalists and those who work with them, both of whom are regularly denounced in state and private media.

The state-run news agency MENA reported that Mohammed is facing an array of charges, including spreading false news with the intent to harm the national interest, as well as belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt has designated a terrorist organization.

Meanwhile, lawyer Ezzat Ghoneim of the Egyptian Coordination for Rights and Freedoms, who was the first to report Mohammed’s Wednesday arrest and had criticized authorities’ handling of her daughter publicly, disappeared on his way home Thursday evening.

“No one has seen or heard from him since,” said Ahmed el-Attar of the rights group, which has started an online campaign seeking information about him but assumes he has been arrested. Ghoneim has long supported victims of alleged police torture, the disappeared, and their families in Egypt.