CAIRO: Mustafa Mahmoud Ibrahim, aged 11, was found hanged at the door of his own home in the Al-Marg area by his mother 10 days ago.
A stranger had come knocking one night to tell the boy’s family that he was on the front porch, and the mother found him hanged from the roof of the house. The neighbors helped her rush him to the hospital but the boy had passed away by the time they got there.
As they returned home with the body, they were arrested by the Al-Marg police. Mustafa’s mother tried to file a report on the incident and search for the killer but was told instead, “Do you want your son to be buried or to be sliced up in an autopsy?
The police said that the boy had died from falling off of the swings in front of their home. But the mother pointed out that this was impossible as the child’s death had taken place around midnight, way past the time when he’d be out playing on the swings, and that her son had been hangedAt this point, the officer dragged her to the District Attorney’s office, asking him to close the case before it even started. Again he threatened an autopsy if she didn’t do as she was told. She gave in and the District Attorney gave her a burial permit.
Mahmoud Ibrahim, the father of the child and a traveling salesman, was contacted by his wife straight after the incident. He rushed off to the hospital and saw the rope marks around the boy’s throat. He tried to get this point through to the officer in charge, only to be rebuffed and told: “Please, we don’t want a headache. Your son is dead. It’s over and done with.
He realized then and there that the police wanted to close the case and consider it an act of God.
Later he went to the Zeinhoum morgue and got the coroner to determine whether the boy was deliberately killed by taking a sample from the cord that was wrapped around the boy’s neck and a sample from the boy’s neck.
However, the father wasn’t able to get a copy of the coroner’s report. The coroner said it had to be sent to the general prosecutor first and only they could show it to him.
The grandfather, Talaat Al-Sayyid, said what was so strange was that the detectives weren’t concerned about capturing the assailants or even checking the suspicious strangers living in the building, but went and arrested some other people entirely.
