Lawyer Baqer, blogger Oxygen and activist Douma were beaten and tortured in Badr 1 Prison, according to a prisoner defending campaign.
Human rights lawyer Mohamed El-Baqer, blogger Mohamed “Oxygen” Ibrahim, and activist Ahmed Douma were all beaten and tortured in Badr 1 Prison, the human rights defender-led Till the Last Prisoner campaign reported on mid-April.
According to the campaign, the three were attacked after coming to the defense of their cellmate Hamed Sedeek, who was himself assaulted after refusing to attend a court hearing.
Sedeek, a doctor in his sixties, has suffered several health complications during his three and a half years behind bars. The trio were then sent into solitary confinement as punishment.
Douma has been arbitrarily detained for nearly a decade, while El-Baqer and Ibrahim were each arrested in 2019 and later sentenced to several years in prison alongside activist and author Alaa Abdel Fattah.
El-Baqer was recently included in the State Department’s Without Just Cause political prisoners campaign.
Authorities hold up the Badr Rehabilitation and Correctional Center as a model of humane treatment of prisoners, but it continues to host the same abuses as Egypt’s older prisons.
The Egyptian Network for Human Rights today shared a letter documenting five more attempted suicides in the now-notorious Badr 3 Prison amid authorities’ collective punishment against detainees there.
A court charged former Civil Democratic Movement Spokesperson Yehia Hussein Abdel Hady with spreading false news yesterday, accusing him of “recidivism” less than one year after he was released from a previous false news jailing.
Abdel Hady was convicted of spreading false news in May 2022 after already spending three and a half years in pretrial detention. Although he was sentenced to four years in prison, he left prison one week later after receiving a presidential pardon.
The court, however, accused him of committing the same “crime” again, pointing to three articles that he published, entitled “When will they speak,” “Shame and dialogue,” and “But everyone must be released, including the Brotherhood.”
Abdel Hady’s lawyers requested time to view the case papers, so the court adjourned the trial until May 11 and did not order him into detention.
