By Sarah Carr
CAIRO: The body of a man allegedly killed by two policemen will be exhumed and a new autopsy carried out upon the approval of the Prosecutor General, the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence said Tuesday.
Khaled Saeid was buried in Alexandria last Saturday amidst emotional scenes from the hundreds of mourners who turned out to pay last respects and protest his alleged murder by policemen who beat him to death on Sunday June 6.
A copy of the autopsy report obtained by the Nadeem Center earlier this week says that Saeid died as a result of asphyxiation from a plastic wrap found in his throat.
The report goes on to say that “all the small bruises and abrasions [on Saeid’s body] were insignificant in his death” and “that there were no fractures to his skull or any bones.”
Saied’s body is due to be exhumed on Wednesday June 15, 2010.
The Ministry of Interior alleges that Saied died after swallowing a plastic wrap of drugs when he saw two policemen approaching him. Photographs of Saied’s body reportedly taken in a morgue show his badly disfigured face lying in a pool of blood.
Eyewitnesses have told satellite TV talk shows and rights group the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights that Saied was killed when two policemen beat him to death in the entrance of a building near his home in Cleopatra, Alexandria.
On Sunday, the attorney general transferred the investigation of Saied’s death from the Sidi Gaber prosecution office to the Alexandria appeals prosecution office. Nadeem lawyer Mohamed Abdel Aziz alleged that the Sidi Gaber prosecution office was “in league” with the police.
El Nadeem reported that on Tuesday the public prosecution office heard the testimony of four prosecution witnesses as part of the ongoing investigation.
While demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria in recent days condemned what protestors say is another incident of police brutality, the government press continued to present the interior ministry’s version of events.
In his daily column, El-Gomhuria editor Mohamed Ali Ibrahim reproduced on Monday and Tuesday the interior ministry’s allegations that Saeid was a drug user who was evading military service and that the medical report establishes that the cause of death was asphyxiation. He criticized activists who protested Saeid’s death in demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria.
The Nadeem Center responded to Ali in a statement entitled, “Yes a protest … Even if he was a hashish user … Even if he was a murderer!” in which it sardonically thanks the journalist for “having the courage to admit that he can find no fault in the torture of Khaled Saied because he was a drug user”.
The Nadeem statement also questioned how Ali was able to refer to the results of an investigation which is still ongoing, as well as challenging his assertion that doubting an autopsy report is equivalent to casting doubt on the judiciary, “even when the judiciary itself is not obliged to accept an autopsy report”.
The statement concludes by saying that even if Saied was guilty of the crimes Ali ascribes to him, “we would still have held a protest for a hashish user”.
“Why? Because if we’re living in a state built on institutions as Ali claims we are, the procedure used to address these crimes would have been a trial and not torture”.
