Top prosecutor denies rights activist was tortured
CAIRO — Egypt’s chief prosecutor on Sunday denied allegations that the police tortured a human rights activist and vocal critic of President Abdel Fattah elSissi.
Police detained Patrick George Zaki, 28, an Egyptian student at the University of Bologna in Italy, after he arrived in Cairo earlier this month on what was to be a brief visit home.
Zaki told his lawyers he was tortured with electric shocks, beaten and blindfolded during interrogations about his activism, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. The group previously employed Zaki as a gender rights researcher and is now providing him with legal representation.
His defense attorney Huda Nasrallah also told the Associated Press that Zaki repeated his torture allegations on Saturday during a court hearing to appeal his detention. He’s being held while prosecutors investigate claims of disseminating false news and calling for unauthorized protests. The court rejected the appeal.
Recent laws in Egypt have expanded the definition of terrorism and granted police and prosecutors broad powers to arrest and keep people detained for months and even years without ever filing charges or presenting evidence.
Egypt also outlawed all unauthorized protests in 2013, months after elSissi, then defense minister, led the military’s removal of the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi. Morsi’s oneyear rule proved divisive and sparked nationwide protests.
Sunday’s statement from the office of General Prosecutor Hamada elSawy said Zaki did not report that he was “harmed or violated during his arrest or detention” when he spoke to the public prosecution on Feb. 8, the day after his arrest.
As evidence of in the case against Zaki, Egypt’s national security agency provided 10 pages printed from a Facebook account carrying the name Patrick George Zaki. The statement described it as “inflammatory material against the state institutions and figures.”
Zaki’s arrest and detention have generated tremendous interest in Italy where he’s been studying. That’s because of the 2016 death in Egypt of 28yearold Italian researcher Giulio Regeni, whose battered body was found on a roadside on the outskirts of Cairo.