Zahraa El Shater Appeals for Justice

Below is Zahraa’s letter,

I am writing this letter while I am deeply grieved. Perhaps I decided to write because I felt the need to expose how our oppressive government is dealing with my father. They usually conceal what we suffer at their hands.

After the government sentenced my father to seven years in jail through an illegitimate military court, disregarded the four court acquittals he obtained from civil courts, and confiscated his money that he worked hard to gain; after they made him surrender his freedom for no crime he committed except his ideas, now they decided to target his health!

My father suffers from blood pressure and diabetes, in addition to his heart condition. On Tuesday, he was barred from undergoing heart examinations (for the fourth time) although doctors said they are an urgent requirement for him. In the four times my father went to the hospital chosen by prison administration, he was received by police officers who blocked his medical examinations. Yesterday, a police officer interrupted my father’s examination in the middle and asked the doctor to stop his work, assigning instead a Christian doctor thinking he must be hostile to my father because of his affiliation. But to the officer’s surprise, the doctor was fair enough to say that my father is in urgent need for treatment, and asked him in a written prescription to bring him back the following day to continue his examination.

Moments later, my father saw the officer erasing by his hand what the doctor has written! My father went back to prison in a state of frustration, and was promised a second visit to the hospital but in a different date than that written by the doctor.

The day came. My father had prepared himself for a radiology examination by fasting and stopping the blood pressure medicine for two days, though it was a risk to do this with such an unpredictable regime. Not surprisingly, he was informed by an officer whose name is Ahmad Maher that the visit has been cancelled for no obvious reasons. “There are orders to prevent you from any further examinations,” he told my father.

Why does Khairat El Shater deserve all this?!

And how can I possibly bear to see my father in all this suffering?

Zahraa El Shater,

Thursday, May 8, 2008.