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Missing activist Mohamed El-Shafaai was identified at the Zeinhom morgue in Cairo on Sunday evening. The cause of death was two bullet wounds, one of which was to the head. El-Shafaai went missing on 29 January and his body was reportedly found the same day on Qasr El-Nile Bridge.
Ragia Omran, a lawyer and activist at No to Military Trials for Civilians (NoMilTrials) said El-Shafaai was reportedly still alive when found, but succumbed to his wounds at Al-Helal hospital.
The circumstances surrounding El-Shafaai’s death are still obscure, Omran warned, adding that if he had been taken to the hospital and died as a result of gunshot wounds, the prosecutors would have been notified. “We are trying to track the prosecutor’s report to see what went wrong,” she said.
El-Shafaai went missing after clashes broke out at Al-Azbakeia police station.
El-Shafaai had been missing for over three weeks before he was identified in the morgue. Omran said his body was not in the morgue freezer, but in a pile with several other unidentified bodies. The failure to preserve the deceased is, Omran said, “unacceptable”.
“We are submitting an official complaint to the forensic medical authority,” Omran said. “The family is currently going through the procedures and paperwork needed to bury him.”
For the past three weeks El-Shafaai’s family has been searching for him, Omran said. “They took with them photographs and checked the morgue and the hospital several times but they were never given any information,” she added.
Omran said NoMilTrials had also searched for El-Shafaai but to no avail, and would now be tracking down all the paperwork. “It is still too early to say what is going on,” she said.
