Egypt 'forcibly disappeared' five family members six months ago
Five members of the same family have been forcibly disappeared for six months by Egyptian security forces, rights groups say.
According to the Egyptian Network for Human Rights (ENHR) and the Stop Enforced Disappearances campaign, Nasser Abdel Moneim Abdel Naseem and four of his family members, including his wife and daughter, have been missing since being arbitrarily detained in Cairo and Alexandria in May.
The groups have demanded that the authorities reveal their whereabouts.
Naseem, 62, was detained at his workplace in Cairo on 27 May. His wife, Amal Abdel Salam Ibrahim Hassan, their daughter Reham Nasser Abdel Moneim and two other family members, including Hassan’s sister Ghada Abdel Salam Ibrahim, were arrested on the same day in Alexandria.
“I don’t know why they would arrest the whole family,” Ahmed Attar, executive director of ENHR, told Middle East Eye.
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Attar, who knows Ibrahim personally and last spoke to her before her arrest, said that she used to live in Bahrain, returning to Egypt two years ago.
“She was scared to go back to Egypt. But she got through the airport and has lived here freely for two years,” he said.
Attar also suggested that Ibrahim's arrest could be due to her posting about Palestine on her social media pages, adding that the last post on Ibrahim’s Facebook page was about Palestine.
ENHR said in a statement that it holds the “Egyptian security authorities fully responsible for their safety and demands their immediate release" and "condemns the arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance of citizens outside the framework of the law.
“These abuses, shielded by official complicity, reinforce a culture of impunity, undermining basic human rights and violating both Egyptian and international laws, treaties, and conventions prohibiting enforced disappearances,” it added.
'Systematic increase' in disappearances
According to ENHR, this is the second case of an entire family being forcibly disappeared. It follows the disappearance of Sayed Ahmed Salem and his four sons after they were detained in November 2016 at their home in the Nakhil district of central Sinai.
Eight years later, despite multiple complaints filed to the authorities, the family has received no information about what happened to the men.
According to a letter signed by ENHR and other Egyptian rights groups, Egypt has seen a “systematic increase” in disappearances,with 3,600 people forcibly disappeared between 2013 and January 2023 according to the Stop Enforced Disappearances Campaign.
It added that from the end of 2022 until February 2023, 40 people reappeared following over three years of enforced disappearance, including a child who was only 13 at the time of his arrest. According to the statement, the detainees were tortured and “illegally interrogated” during their detention.
Egyptian authorities also target rights groups documenting these cases, including the co-founder of the Association of the Forcibly Disappeared, Ibrahim Metwally, who was also the lawyer for Giulio Regeni’s family, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University who was discovered dead in January 2016, after being left semi-naked on the side of the Cairo-Alexandria highway.
Metwally has remained in detention since 2017.
According to Attar, cases of enforced disappearances tend to spike around anniversaries and events, like that of the Egyptian revolution on 25 January.
They have also surged since October as part of a widespread crackdown on expressions of Palestine solidarity.
“It’s becoming crazy, especially around Palestine and especially near 25 January every year,” he said.
Despite its public opposition to Israel’s war, Egypt has detained hundreds of people who took part in pro-Palestine action over the past year, including at least 250 football fans, students and women's rights activists.
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