(Photos Public Domain)
A photojournalist, the star of an Oscar nominated documentary and two others were added to the list of arrests and disappearances that has been expanding in Egypt recently.
Freelance photojournalist Esraa El-Taweel, Sohaib Saad, and Omar Mohamed were announced missing Tuesday after disappearing since Monday.
Mahfouz El-Taweel, Esraa’s father, said that his daughter and the other two went out together Monday near the Maadi Nile Corniche, in south Cairo, before they went missing.
El-Taweel was injured by gunshot while covering the protests that commemorated the 25 January Revolution anniversary in 2014, and since then has been suffering difficulties in movement. Sohaib Saad was just released from prison in February pending the retrial of the Al Jazeera journalists’ case.
The three were not found in nearby police stations, and their relatives expressed fear over them being “abducted”. “The safety of my daughter is the responsibility of every official in the state,” Esraa’s father said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Magdy Ashour, who starred in the Oscar nominated documentary “The Square”, was arrested from his house in the Al-Haram neighbourhood in Giza Tuesday. Mohamed Sobhy, a lawyer from Nedal rights organisation, confirmed Ashour was arrested, citing an ongoing campaign of arrests in the past two days.
Ashour, who is a former Muslim Brotherhood member, escaped in February 2014 from an attempted arrest, also from his house.
The recent wave of arrests and forced disappearance saw a Sinai-based activist, Sabry Al-Ghoul, detained for several hours by the military before he died, allegedly at the headquarters of Battalion 101 in Al-Arish.
Also on 19 May, an engineering student from Ain Shams University, Islam Ateeto, was abducted from outside his faculty before being found killed in a desert road north east of Cairo.
