August 1, 2019

The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) said on Wednesday that prosecutors are investigating the killing of two people inside El-Dekheila police station in Alexandria during their detention.

ECRF confirmed that one of the two victims was Said Mohammed al-Saeed, a 46-year-old carpenter and father of six. Al-Saeed entered the police department on July 18 to begin proceedings for a one-month sentence for misdemeanor.

Al-Saeed remained in the police station until July 24 when his sister received a phone call from a police secretary who told her that her brother had died while in custody. 

When his sister went to the police station she was told that al-Saeed was in Kasr al-Shifa hospital. There she saw traces of beatings and blood on her brother’s body that prompted the victim’s family to refuse to receive his body without an autopsy. 

ECRF said that the family learned from a hospital employee that an informant had brought two bodies to the hospital and left them there.

Torture in detention centres in Egypt continued for decades until the January 25 2011 revolution sparked by the torture of Khaled Said, by a police officer, which led to his death on June 6 2010.

During the first year of Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s reign, the Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, an Egyptian civil society organisation, documented 272 deaths and 289 torture cases as a result of security violations and 119 cases of enforced disappearance and 97 cases of medical negligence.