By Sarah Carr
CAIRO: A trial begins Tuesday at the Alexandria Criminal Court of two policemen charged with offences in connection with the death of Khaled Saied.
Thirty-three-year-old Awad Ismail Suleiman and 26-year-old Mahmoud Salah Mahmoud have been charged with illegal use of force, illegal arrest and torture of an individual arrested without legal grounds.
Saied, 28, died in Cleopatra, Alexandria after he was apprehended by Suleiman and Mahmoud in an internet café near his home. Eyewitnesses describe seeing the two policemen viciously assaulting Saied in the entrance of a neighboring building.
Immediately after Saied’s death the interior ministry alleged in a statement that Saied was a drug user with previous criminal convictions who had evaded military service.
Ali Qassem, Saied’s uncle announced in June that the family would be pressing charges against the interior ministry for defamation.
The ministry’s statement claimed that Saied died after asphyxiating on a plastic drug wrap of marijuana he had swallowed upon seeing the policemen approach him.
This presentation of the events inflamed a furious public reaction to graphic pictures of Saied’s badly disfigured face, taken by the dead man’s brother in a morgue.
Two autopsies — the second one performed after Saied’s body had been exhumed — upheld the Ministry of Interior’s version of events. This sparked protests in Cairo and Alexandria against what demonstrators said was another incident of the authorities attempting to cover up police brutality.
The Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence on Monday issued a statement in which it said that a reading of the two autopsy reports by international experts found “many shortcomings and oversights” in the reports.
The experts say that the forensic doctors who performed the postmortem “did not carry out the basic tests necessary to determine the cause of death” and that much of the language used in the report “was not in conformity with international basic minimum forensic standards.”
In response to the violent police reaction to protests, demonstrators have subsequently organized a series of “silent protests” throughout Egypt, in which participants dressed in black face waterways in silence.
Last Friday hundreds of activists in Alexandria gathered outside the Saied family home after the silent protest.
The failure of more senior officers to be sent to trial in connection with Saied’s death has been criticized by rights groups.
Earlier this month the Nadim Center reported that witnesses to the crime had allegedly been harassed and intimidated by the police, and that one man, Tamer Abdel-Meneim Mostafa, had to be hospitalized overnight after he was assaulted, allegedly at the behest of police officer Ahmed Othman.
Nadim says that the assault happened both because Mostafa allegedly knows one of the witnesses who saw Othman at the scene of Saeid’s death shortly after the latter died, and because he has other information about the case.
