By Khaled Soubeih /AFP
CAIRO: Hundreds of people went missing in Egypt during protests that toppled president Hosni Mubarak, a leading human rights group said on Tuesday, alleging that some are being held by the army.
Gamal Eid, a lawyer who heads the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, said: “There are hundreds of detained, but information on their numbers is still not complete … The army was holding detainees.”
His group said in a statement that it was still receiving “information relating to the disappearances of many youths and citizens.”
Eid urged the military to publish a list of detainees’ names regardless of the reasons for their arrest, and to guarantee all of them their rights.
The military “sorts out the detainees based on the reason for their arrest, and this could take time, but that does not excuse not announcing their names and places of detention,” he said.
Local media have begun to report detentions, with the independent daily newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm publishing a list of names of people who reportedly went missing in the past weeks.
Those recorded in the list are mostly between the ages of 15 and 48 years, men and women, and went missing between Jan. 25, the first day of anti-government protests, and Feb. 9.
Nasser Amin, a lawyer who heads the Arab Center for Judicial Independence, said the military might be holding people, but a number of the detainees were arrested by plainclothes police as they left protests in Tahrir Square.
The protests in the square in the heart of Cairo were the epicenter of the revolt that forced Mubarak to resign on Feb. 11.
He added that there were efforts to petition the state prosecutor into ordering a search of detention centers and survey the number of detainees.
At least 300 people were killed during the protests, the United Nations has estimated, which were mostly peaceful but also flared into nationwide violence targeting police stations across the country.
On Monday, a group calling itself the Coalition of the Revolution’s Youth demanded in a statement the cancellation of the emergency law and the release of all political prisoners.
It was one of the main demands by a delegation from the group that met on Sunday the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took over the country after Mubarak’s resignation.
The coalition called for a demonstration on Friday to commemorate the “martyrs of the revolution.”
