Egyptian official named in US torture allegation

CAIRO – After his arrest in 2013 for documenting the deadliest crackdown on protesters in Egypt’s modern history, Mohamed Soltan landed in a notorious prison where he says he was brutally tortured for 21 months.

He never thought he’d get a chance to fight back, let alone make it out alive.

But on Monday, Soltan, a 32-yearold U.S. citizen now living in Virginia, used a little-known federal statute to accuse former Egyptian prime minister Hazem el-Beblawi of crimes against humanity.

The law, called the 1991 Torture Victims Protection Act, allows for victims of torture and extrajudicial killings committed by foreign officials abroad to seek justice through the American court system.

It’s the first such case against an

Egyptian official, made possible by the grim coincidence that el-Beblawi now lives just miles from Soltan, in Washington, where he is an executive director of the International Monetary Fund.

“He’s completely gotten away with it, and is walking free downtown,” Soltan said. “I just want to regain some of the justice and dignity stripped away from me.”

In the summer of 2013, after the military-led ouster of the country’s first democratically elected but divisive president, Mohamed Morsi, Egyptian security officers descended on a protest camp packed with his Islamist supporters, killing hundreds. Soltan, an Ohio State graduate and the son of a prominent member of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, was shot in the arm while working as a stringer for Western news organizations in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square.