- EGYPT
- May 13, 2015
- 2 minutes read
Rights Activists Condemn Continued Forced Disappearance of ‘Students Against The Coup’ Spokesman Ghoneim
A number of rights activists, lawyers and university students have launched a campaign on social-networking websites, entitled "Where is Ghoneim", to put pressure on Egyptian authorities to disclose the whereabouts of Ahmed Ghoneim, a student at the Faculty of Science, Cairo University, and former spokesperson of the Students Against The Coup (SAC) movement.
Coup security forces arrested Ghoneim on May 1, 2015 and has held him since then at a secret location. His whereabouts are still unknown. It has been more than nine days since the forced disappearance of the student whose colleagues fear is being tortured in detention.
Ghoneim is one of SAC’s founders. In 2013, he was suspended from his university studies for a full year on false charges of assaulting Ali Gomaa, the former Grand Mufti of Egypt, at the Faculty of Science. Over the past year, junta-controlled Egyptian media published allegations by security sources at Cairo University claiming that Ghoneim was the mastermind of SAC’s demonstrations at the university.
It is an established practice for coup security agencies in Egypt to arrest people, hide them in undisclosed places of detention for long periods, and refuse to give out any information to their families or lawyers, only for those detainees to show up days or months later, after interrogation under duress and torture by security agencies who seek false confessions to incriminate either the detainees themselves or other people they may not even know. Numerous cases of deaths under torture in detention have been documented since the traitorous July 3, 2013 coup.
