By Sarah Carr
CAIRO: Lawyer Mohamed Abdel Aziz from El Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence told Daily News Egypt that the prosecution office refused to examine the crime scene of a man who eyewitnesses allege was beaten to death by two police informants in Alexandria because it was “unnecessary”.
He added, however that the decision to transfer the case of 28-year-old Khaled Mohamed Saeid to the Alexandria Appeals court was “good” because “Sidi Gaber’s investigation was weak and slow and they are in league with the police.”
The brutal killing of Saeid was strongly condemned by right groups, and triggered mass protests and condemnations by activists.
Meanwhile, the interior ministry in a statement published Saturday, claimed that Saeid died from a drug overdose, despite the fact that pictures of Saeid’s badly deformed face had emerged earlier this week.
Amnesty International said that the “horrific” photographs, which appear to have been taken in a morgue, “are shocking evidence of the abuses taking place in Egypt” and “a rare, first-hand glimpse of the routine use of brutal force by Egyptian security forces, who expect to operate in a climate of impunity, with no questions asked.”
Saeid was in an internet café on Sunday June 6 in the Cleopatra area of Alexandria when, according to eyewitnesses, two informants (who are on the interior ministry’s payroll) who Saeid had never seen before, came in and asked Saeid for proof of his identity, which he refused.
Hassan Mesbah the owner of the internet café was quoted as saying in news reports that Saeid didn’t go to the internet café often, “kept to himself” and was of good character.
Mesbah explained that the two men restrained Saeid by holding his hands behind his back and in a headlock before taking him to a corner of the internet café where they hit his head against a marble counter when he attempted to resist them.
When Mesbah objected, they took Saeid outside to the entrance of a neighboring building where he says they beat him to death.
Another eyewitness says that when Saeid collapsed lifeless on the ground and onlookers said that he was dead, the two men said that “he’s pretending.”
Mesbah says that they then took his body to the police station.
“About seven or eight minutes later they brought him back, carried [his body] off the police van like it was a sheep’s carcass and threw him in the building’s entrance. An ambulance then arrived,” Mesbah says in a video posted on Facebook by a reporter with Al Ghad newspaper Mahmoud El Sawy, in which Mesbah is interviewed by another Ghad reporter Hanan Mostafa.
Mesbah was scheduled to give evidence to the public prosecution office on Sunday, but lawyers could not be reached for confirmation by time of press.
However, the Ministry of Interior gives a different version of events.
Its statement mentions that “certain elements” are using the media to “spread claims that secret policemen assaulted Saeid which caused his death.
“The truth of the matter is that two members of the Sidi Gaber police station investigations unit … saw Saeid accompanied by one of his friends, and when the two police officers approached them Said swallowed a small packet,” the statement continued.
“It subsequently became clear that this packet contained drugs. Saeid was asphyxiated when he swallowed it, leading to his death.”
The interior ministry also claims that Saeid had been sentenced in absentia in two cases of theft and possession of illegal weapons, had been apprehended in four other cases of theft and possession of illegal weapons and that he was evading military service.
The statement says that this version of events is confirmed both by the friend who was allegedly with Said at the time he died and an ambulance medic, and is further substantiated by a preliminary forensic medical report.
Yet Khaled’s sister Zahra told Daily News Egypt that “the forensic medical report was supposed to come out yesterday, but now they’re telling us to wait until the end of the week.”
The Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence has also issued a statement in response to the interior ministry, titled “We won’t back down as long as you don’t,” in which it refutes the ministry’s account and angrily rejects its claim that rights groups are circulating false information about Saeid’s death.
The statement asks why two police officers approached Saeid in the first place, asking, “If the interior ministry is to be believed in its claim that Khaled had been convicted in absentia of offences, why didn’t an official police unit go to his house and apprehend him there after producing an arrest warrant?”
The Nadeem statement also raises the possibility that the drug packet might have been deliberately placed in Saeid’s throat after his death, asking, “Is this what the interior ministry did during the 10 minutes that Khaled’s body was taken away from the building entrance in which he was beaten to death?”
While Zahra Saeid says that there have “not been any developments” yet in the investigation, the Nadeem Center is critical of the way in which the public prosecution office is conducting the investigation.
Two policemen and a police officer have been questioned and released by the public prosecution office, according to state mouthpiece Al-Ahram.
It says that on Saturday a prosecution witness was kept waiting for four hours to give his testimony before being told that the public prosecution office was not free to hear it, “while the head of the Alexandria security directorate and head of the Sidi Gaber investigations section went in and out of the offices of the district attorney and the head of the prosecution office.”
The statement also asks why lawyers have been prevented from taking a copy of the case file.
Amnesty International says that under Egypt’s state of emergency — renewed in May for a further two years — “abuses by the security forces are routine and rarely punished.”
“The Egyptian authorities must respond immediately to this brutal beating and killing … If they do not take action, it will yet again send a clear signal that these abuses may continue and guarantee that the perpetrators get away with it,” the statement reads.
Zahra Saeid is calling for a “proper investigation … that those involved be taken to court.”
“Even if he was a terrorist, not just a drug dealer as they are claiming, they should have taken him to the police station, not beaten him to death,” she said. –Additional reporting by Marwa Ibrahim.
