American teacher freed from Egypt prison
CAIRO — An American schoolteacher imprisoned in Egypt for nearly a year without trial has been freed by Egyptian authorities and returned home to the United States, the State Department said Monday.
Reem Desouky, 47, a dual EgyptianAmerican citizen and single mother from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was arrested on arrival at the Cairo Airport with her teenage son in July 2019 and taken to Qanatir Prison outside the capital. She faced charges of running a Facebook page critical of the Egyptian government. Security officials had confiscated her phone and interrogated her about her political opinions and social media posts, according to her lawyers.
Human rights groups denounced her detention as arbitrary and politically-motivated.
“The Department of State has no higher priority than the safety and welfare of U.S. citizens overseas,” said spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, welcoming news of Desouky’s release.
Although the arrest of online critics in Egypt isn’t unusual, the incarceration of U.S. citizens in the country has drawn more intensive scrutiny since the death of detained American Mustafa Kassem this year.
Kassem had spent six years in prison on what he insisted were false charges and died after a long hunger strike in January, sparking sharp condemnation from the Trump administration and even calls to freeze military aid to Egypt. U.S. lawmakers seized on the opportunity to increase pressure on the administration to secure Desouky’s release.
“There had been high-level engagement on her case for months, but it was all upped after the death of Kassem,” said Mohamed Soltan, founder of the Freedom Initiative, which advocated Desouky’s case. “We think Egypt released her as a way to minimize some of that mounting pressure.”
International criticism of Egypt’s bleak human rights record intensified further over the weekend, when news broke that Shady Habash, a young Egyptian filmmaker imprisoned for directing a satirical music video about President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, had suddenly died. The cause of his death was not immediately clear, but it cast a spotlight on the potentially lethal conditions in Egyptian prisons, where thousands of political prisoners languish without trial.