CAIRO: Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas was held Tuesday morning at Cairo Airport and had his laptop and some of his belongings confiscated.
The controversial blogger was returning home after a conference in Sweden when he was stopped by customs officials at 3 am local time, right after the Lufthansa flight landed.
Abbas was released by late morning, but without his laptop and suitcase.
He continued to update his Twitter page as he was being stopped, held, searched and processed by the authorities. His ordeal was available live on the social messaging site.
Abbas is one of the best known bloggers in Egypt and has won numerous international awards in journalism and online activism.
Through video posts on his blog, he has been at the heart of multiple exposures of police brutality and harassment in Egypt. He has run into difficulty with authorities in the past.
Abbas was never informed of the reason for his being stopped, though at one point an official told him that an informer had passed on information about him. Abbas was also not questioned. And though eventually released, Abbas still does not have his laptop.
After deboarding the aircraft, Abbas says he was met by police who escorted him to the customs area. Upon arriving there, his passport was taken. Abbas waited for approximately four hours. During this time he staged a “sit-in in which he sat on the floor, holding up a sign that read “This is a sit-in. State Security took my passport.
He was unable to proceed through customs without his passport.
A customs agent returned Abbas’ passport, explaining that a significant workload that morning was the cause of the delay. Other passengers from Abbas’ flight, he noted, also had their passports revoked but they were returned within a matter of minutes.
After clearing customs, he was taken to a separate room where officials looked through his wallet, backpack, camera and conference papers. He says his belongings were returned, with the exception of the laptop, some of the conference papers and his hotel room key from Sweden.
He was told that the laptop would be sent to the appropriate authorities to be scanned for illegal and pirated software and materials.
Abbas does not believe this is the real reason for the confiscation. Instead, he thinks state security is interested in reviewing the files and personal information on his computer.
He was then released, without further explanation or guidance.
After being held up for around five hours, his luggage was not on the baggage carousel at the point at which he arrived there. He suspects that state security may have taken the luggage to search it. But he later received his luggage around 4:30 in the afternoon.
Abbas had been attending the Tallberg Forum, an annual conference in the north of Sweden in which participants discuss interdependence on the global scale. The forum features politicians, intellectuals and other public figures. At the forum Abbas discussed social networking and the limitations to freedom of speech in Egypt.
Abbas believes the government-affiliated youth organization “Future Generation had members in attendance at the forum who were responsible for tipping off authorities in Cairo as to his impending entrance back into the country.
The practice of Tweeting during detention is not new. In April Palestinian journalist Laila El-Haddad was detained in Cairo Airport for several hours after arriving from the US with her family. She updated her situation on Twitter during the ordeal.
Some believe her real-time relaying of the events stopped her from being arrested. Friends, family and colleagues followed her situation and contacted American and Egyptian officials demanding to know the reason for her detention.
Three lawyers went to Abbas’ aid at the airport and then proceeded to file an official complaint at the airport police station.
