By Essam Fadl
CAIRO: The Egyptian Center for Development and Human Rights filed two complaints on Tuesday to Prosecutor General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud accusing former interior minister Habib El-Adly of the murder of 168 prisoners in Al-Fayoum prison, after they were handed over by military police to security forces on Jan. 30.
The complaints, signed by the prisoners’ families who refused to collect the bodies of their family members, said that the bodies are still inside the Zinhom morgue showing signs of torture.
Malek Tawfik Mosaad, a brother of one of the victims, told Daily News Egypt that his brother called him on Jan. 28 and told him that he was threatened and forced to leave the prison.
The prisoner had asked his brother to pick him up from Fayoum.
“I met my brother at a military checkpoint on Jan.30 in Dahshour where military officers arrested some of the prisoners who tried to flee using the Cairo-Fayoum road,” said Mosaad. “I was told by one of the military officers that they will send my brother with other prisoners in a military truck to Dahshour camp where they will be handed over to police in a couple of days.”
Mosaad said he received a phone call earlier this week from one of the prisoners’ brothers telling him that the bodies of the prisoners are in the Zinhom morgue.
Mosaad went to the morgue where he found his brother’s body covered with bruises and blood. He also claimed that all the other bodies showed clear signs of torture and gunshots.
Families of the prisoners refused to collect the bodies of their relatives and decided to file a complaint to the Prosecutor General.
The lawsuits say that the directorate of health affairs in Cairo issued a report confirming that the cause of death was suffocation that led to a decline in the circulatory and respiratory system, without mentioning signs of torture.
The complaints demanded an investigation into the issue and an individual forensic examination for each body.
The victims’ families accused El-Adly of murdering their sons.
Head of the Egyptian Center for Development and Human Rights Joseph Ibrahim told Daily News Egypt that the bodies show clear signs of torture, with fingernails removed, and gunshots to the head and chest and other parts of their bodies.
“This is mass murder, all prisoners were brutally killed.”
