• EGYPT
  • January 5, 2016
  • 4 minutes read

Torture Fears in Qena General Prison as Inmate Badly Maimed by New Chief

Torture Fears in Qena General Prison as Inmate Badly Maimed by New Chief
A notoriously brutal prison officer causes serious concerns torturing and badly injuring an inmate, after getting a suspended sentence for torturing another to death.

A new Chief of Detectives at Qena General Prison (called Islam Abdel-Badie) tortured a 26-year old detainee called Mohamed Ahmed Maghrebi, from Aswan Governorate, in cell number 13, on the third floor. Maghrebi was being held in custody pending an investigation. He was tortured by Abdel-Badie in front of his colleagues and at the center of a gathering of police officers at the prison – some of them participated in acts of torture.

In an attempt to prevent the injured detainees from lodging any complaints, the Chief of Detectives took him to the prison hospital, where he enlisted the help of the hospital officer to register a statement describing the torture wounds as "self-inflicted injuries". Even worse, rather than treat the wounded detainee, especially for injuries resulting from trauma to the head, the officer threw him into another dark dungeon.

That made fellow detainees in other cells fear for their lives, knowing that this officer has always tortured prisoners wherever he worked.

Officer Abdel-Badie was sentenced to a one-year suspended jail sentence in a case of torturing a prisoner to death, and he was transferred from Minya Prison only a few days earlier.

Abdel-Badie continues to stir up unrest among prisoners and detainees, resorting to heinous methods like forcing some of the detainees out of bathrooms, claiming it was the end of the exercise period.

Detainees spend most of the day and all night without access to a bathroom, while they suffer incredible overcrowding in their cells. There are only 6 toilets for well over 300 prisoners and detainees on the ground floor.

This prison is one of few in the world which has no toilets in cells, in contravention of all laws and regulations and local and international human rights conventions. Some of the prisoners and detainees are elderly, some are sick and others have special needs.

Moreover, officer Abdel-Badie broke into the prison cells and pulled away all bed covers and blankets, and banned inmates from receiving any bed covers in visits, in spite of the bitter cold.