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IV. Torture and Ill-treatment

Torture and ill-treatment of persons detained in connection with the Taba attacks appears to have been widespread. The November 2004 reports of the EOHR and the Egyptian Association Against Torture included testimonies of persons who themselves had suffered ill-treatment at the hands of security forces, specifically the SSI.

Among the victims and eyewitnesses who spoke with Human Rights Watch in early December, four persons had themselves been detained. Two of the four provided credible testimonies of torture inflicted on them by the SSI during interrogation; the two others said they had not themselves been tortured but had seen persons who had suffered torture and heard screaming and similar indications of security forces’ inflicting pain on detainees.

These testimonies indicate that not all persons taken into custody in connection with the Taba attacks suffered torture and ill-treatment themselves. However, the fact that hundreds of persons remained in detention, and the fact that many of those who had been released were reluctant to risk further harassment or re-arrest by speaking with Human Rights Watch, suggests that many detainees suffered serious abuse at the hands of SSI interrogators.

Cases of Torture and Ill-Treatment

Hamid Batrawi, twenty-six

Hamid Batrawi is one of eight brothers, six of whom had been taken into custody. Hamid and his youngest brother, Halim, had been released when Human Rights Watch met with Hamid on the afternoon of December 7.87 He told Human Rights Watch that he understood, on the basis of a telephone call from a security officer, that three of his brothers were then in Tora Prison, in Cairo. He said the fourth was in SSI headquarters in al-`Arish, according to a person who had been released from there. No member of the family has been identified by the authorities as a suspect in the Taba attacks.

Hamid said that police had returned to his home the morning before he met with Human Rights Watch, December 7. The next evening, December 8, immediately after Human Rights Watch departed al-`Arish, he was again brought in for questioning.88

Hamid had been working about four months as a supervisor in an asphalt plant in the southern Sinai Peninsula. He spent a week at home in al-`Arish in mid-November and decided on November 22 to return to work. His trip passed without incident as far as Isma`iliyya, but on the road south to Suez, at about 10 a.m., his car was stopped. Officers asked for his identity papers and searched his belongings, throwing his clothes out onto the wet sand. They took him to the police station near Suez. There, he said, he was kept on the roof of the two-story building until the next afternoon, when he was transferred to the SSI headquarters in Suez. At both the police station and the SSI headquarters he gave his boss’s phone number to the authorities, urging them to call to check his bona fides.

At the SSI headquarters, the officer in charge, whom others referred to as “Haitham,” checked his name on the computer, and asked Hamid why he had not mentioned that five of his brothers were in detention. It was now about 12:30 p.m. The officers blindfolded him and stripped off his clothing except for his underpants. They tied his hands tied behind his back, and bound his feet as well. He was then hung by his hands from the top of an iron door, causing excruciating pain to his shoulders. His toes just touched the floor, which was wet, when all muscle control was relaxed, he said.  He said that wires were attached to his toes and to his undershorts, that he was beaten with a hose and administered jolts of electricity every couple of minutes, and that the shock intensified when his toes rested on the wet floor. This continued, he thought, until about 5 p.m. Hamid said his interrogator asked him about the Taba bombing and what his brothers had done. He said he understood that he was being interrogated by the officer in charge of this SSI office because others present kept encouraging him to “reply to Haitham.”89 

When he was removed from the door where he had been hung, Hamid said, he fell face down on the floor. Officials then took him to a hospital in Suez.  Aida Seif-al-Dawla, a medical doctor who accompanied Human Rights Watch to al-`Arish, told Human Rights Watch that she visited Hamid in the hospital after getting a call from his mother, who reportedly was called by a security officer urging her to get Hamid from the hospital before the SSI did. According to Hamid and Dr. Seif al-Dawla, the SSI told hospital personnel that Hamid’s injuries were the result of an epileptic fit he suffered while at their headquarters applying for a job. The SSI officers wanted Hamid to be discharged to their custody as soon as he regained consciousness, but a nurse insisted that his condition required that he remain in the hospital’s intensive care ward. Ahmad Seif, of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, and Ashraf Ayoub, of the Popular Committee for North Sinai Citizens’ Rights, told Human Rights Watch that they had inquired about Hamid’s whereabouts at the SSI office in Suez on the same day, but found no record of his having been there.90

Dr. Seif al-Dawla told Human Rights Watch that because of Hamid’s injuries, she arranged for him to be transported from the hospital in Suez to `Ain Shams University Hospital, where she practices and teaches. “He was carried in moaning, he couldn’t speak or walk,” she told Human Rights Watch. “He was protecting his face with both arms and screaming that no one should touch him. His face and eyes were congested with blood.” An examination showed no bones had been broken, she said, but it was a week of intensive psychotherapy and anti-depressant and sleep-inducing medicines before he could talk and walk.91 Shortly afterwards, he returned to his mother’s home in al-`Arish.

Hamid said that earlier on the day of the interview with Human Rights Watch two police officers visited him at his home to request that he go to Suez to retrieve his belongings, but that he begged off, saying he was too tired to travel. He said that he spent the night of December 3rd at the home of his sister. Security forces arrived there at about 2:30 a.m., he said, looking for her twenty-nine-year-old husband. They searched the house “upside down,” he said. They asked Hamdan how he was feeling, and took his brother-in-law into custody in the al-`Arish SSI headquarters, he said.92

`Abd al-Nur al-Sayyid, twenty-one, works in a family-owned kiosk

`Abd al-Nur al-Sayyid told Human Rights Watch he was arrested on the 3rd of Ramadan (October 18), the day after his father had died.93 “It was about 3 a.m.,” he told Human Rights Watch.

About eight officers knocked and came right in, while we were holding the wake for my father. There were many veiled women. I tried to stop them. One hit me in the face. My brother Ahmad [twenty-three] was in his room. They took the two of us in a car and went around to other houses and took about six more. They didn’t have any order, and they didn’t give any reason.94

Al-Sayyid told Human Rights Watch that he and the others arrived at SSI headquarters in al-`Arish at around 4 a.m., where they were kept in the corridors. When he asked to be able to pray, one guard hit him with the back of his hand and punched him in the stomach with a baton. He was then moved to a floor where some two hundred detainees were being kept in rooms that usually served as quarters for SSI personnel. There were no toilet facilities and they had to use their food pails to relieve themselves. He was kept in these conditions for six days. He told Human Rights Watch that he was interrogated three times, the first time two days after his arrest.

They blindfolded me and my hands were tied behind my back. I could see out the bottom a bit. In the interrogation room, there was one person who did not speak. He was not Egyptian, and only used gestures. They were friendly at first and asked me what I knew about the Qur’an. Suddenly they started beating me from behind. Then they were asking how I became a committed Muslim, and I felt that someone was stripping my clothes. I saw the hand of the guy who didn’t talk, he flipped his finger up and then I was suspended by my hands from behind from a door. A well-built guy was pulling my leg. They tied a wire around one toe and wet it with something that smelled like gasoline.

Al-Sayyid said he was suspended for about two hours, fearing that he would be shocked by an electric current, although that did not happen. The second interrogation, he said, did not involve the torture. “I was just quizzed about the names of people,” he said, but

the third time was the same as the first. They wanted a confession: Where did you train? How many times did you go to the mountains? Give us the names of the Islamic organizations. This [third] time someone else was being tortured there too. “Didn’t you change your mind?” they said. “Confess to what he is saying.” Eventually I fainted and again I woke up in a cell. This was the fifth day for me. The next day I was back squatting in the corridors for twenty-three hours at a stretch, with one break to go to the toilet. Our families brought food for us but the soldiers would take half of it.

Al-Sayyid said that on the morning of the seventh day, at the time of the dawn prayer, he and about twenty others were put into trucks. “We saw about five trucks leave with men in them the previous day,” he told Human Rights Watch. “This day it was just one. When we asked where we were being taken, they told us ‘home.’ But instead we arrived at Tora Reception.”  This is a part of the large Tora Prison complex in Cairo.

“We were forced to crouch and keep our heads down [as we went in],” al-Sayyid said. “We couldn’t see the officers but we could see the dogs they held on chains, almost reaching us.” He said they were forced to strip to their underclothes, and then provided prison clothing in their cells. His brother was among those sent to Tora, though they were not in the same cell together. They were there for twenty-one days before they were moved to Mazra`at Tora, and there interrogations and torture resumed. “I was tortured twice in the course of three days,” al-Sayyid told Human Rights Watch. “They were kicking and punching me, and they had attack dogs with muzzles. One officer noticed that I could see a bit despite the blindfold so then they put on a blindfold soaked in gasoline.” The interrogators “wanted us to confess to using arms, to belonging to an organization, to implicate Hani Abu Shita,” al-Sayyid said.95

After this ordeal, al-Sayyid said, he and others were again handcuffed and put in trucks and driven back to al-`Arish. “There they kept us standing for about eight hours—no food, nothing to drink, no toilet,” he said. “All the beards were kept together. Those without beards were released first. Some beards were brought upstairs”—i.e., to the interrogation room.

Al-Sayyid said he was released on the eve of the `Id, after about one month in captivity. He was not charged at any point with committing an offense. Since then, security officials have not bothered him, but the authorities have told him that the kiosk he had inherited from his father would no longer be allowed to conduct business on account of problems with proper licensing.

Torture under International and Egyptian Law 

The use of torture and other forms of ill-treatment are prohibited by the ICCPR and by the Convention against Torture. Egypt ratified the Convention against Torture in 1986.

Article 1 of the Convention against Torture defines torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering is:

intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

Article 2 of the Convention obliges states parties to take “effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture.” Article 16 requires that states parties must “prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture.”

The government of Egypt, in its October 1998 supplementary report to the Committee against Torture (CAT), stated that “the Convention is a law of the country, all of its provisions are directly and immediately applicable and enforceable before all State authorities,”96 and noted that the Egyptian Constitution “prohibits the subjection of individuals to physical or mental harm.”97

The country’s Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure also include provisions forbidding torture and establishing penalties against those guilty of committing acts of torture. Article 126 of the Penal Code establishes penalties of imprisonment and hard labor for “any public servant or official who orders, or participates in, the torture of an accused person with a view to inducing the said person to make a confession,” and Article 282 specifies a sentence of hard labor “in all cases, [for] anyone who unlawfully arrests a person and threatens to kill him or subject him to physical torture.”98 According to the government, the “judicial application” of these penal provisions, “in accordance with the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court,” “punishes torture carried out by a member of a public authority or by an individual whether during the arrest, confinement or imprisonment of a person in the legally prescribed circumstances or otherwise.”99

The government’s 1998 report to the CAT also cites Penal Code Articles 126, 129 and 240 to 243 as among the legislative measures employed to combat torture, but does not provide the texts of those Articles. Article 126 pertains to beatings inflicted by public officials.100 Article 129 designates as criminal offences “acts involving coercion and ill-treatment by public officials…as they constitute acts of infringement on and harm against others, with intent to induce confession.”101 The offense occurs “whenever a public official or servant relies on his position to use force in a manner that is detrimental to an individual’s dignity or which causes him bodily pain”102 and the element of crime “obtains with any material act that is likely to cause the victim bodily pain, however slight, even if the act causes no apparent injuries.”103 “[A]ll individuals,” the report states, “whatever their capacity, enjoy the protection prescribed by this article whether they are under arrest, in detention or in other circumstances.”104 Articles 240 to 243 cover assault and battery offenses.105 According to the government’s report to the CAT, “Any person who knows that an offence has occurred is under obligation to report it, an obligation which applies to public officials pursuant to Articles 25 and 26 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.”106

Under Egyptian law, the Inspection Unit of the Ministry of Interior and the Department of Public Prosecution (al-niyaba al-`ama) under the Ministry of Justice are responsible for investigating allegations of torture and ill-treatment. Both offices have strong professional and personal ties with security officials and police under their supervision, and historically have not provided effective recourse for victims of torture.

The Committee against Torture has expressed concern that deferral of notification of arrest coupled with deferral of access to counsel during the first forty-eight hours of detention amounts to detention “incommunicado, thereby creating conditions which might lead to abuses of authority by agents of the State.”107



[87] Egyptian human rights monitors visiting al-`Arish in mid-November met with Hamid Batrawi (not his real name) prior to his arrest regarding the detention of his brothers. See “Thus spoke the people of North Sinai: Testimonies of State Security Intelligence Victims in al-`Arish and the city of Shaikh Zuwaid,” Report of a fact-finding visit undertaken by the Egyptian Association against Torture (Leila Soueif, Aida Seif El-Dawla), Hisham Mubarak Law Center (Ahmed Seif El Islam Hamad), El-Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence (Magda Adl), 15-17 November 2004 (Cairo, November 24, 2004).

[88] Human Rights Watch interview with Hamid Batrawi, al-`Arish, December 7, 2004; telephone call  from Hamid Batrawi to Ahmad Seif, director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, December 8, 2004.

[89] Human Rights Watch interview with Hamdan Abu Shita, al-`Arish, December 7, 2004. None of Hamdan Abu Shita’s brothers or cousins were identified by the government as implicated in the Taba attacks.

[90] Discussion with Ahmad Seif and Ashraf Ayoub, al-`Arish, December 7, 2004.

[91] Discussion with Dr. Aida Seif al-Dawla, al-`Arish, December 7, 2004.

[92] Human Rights Watch interview with Hamdan Abu Shita, al-`Arish, December 7, 2004.

[93] He requested that Human Rights Watch not use his real name.

[94] Human Rights Watch interview, name withheld on request, al-`Arish, December 8, 2004.

[95] According to activists in al-`Arish, Hani Abu Shita is a young and charismatic man who led prayers and chanted sacred verses in gatherings there. He and a number of his brothers and cousins were detained in the crackdown, and many believe that he in particular was badly tortured in custody. See EOHR report, November 2004, pp. 8-10.

[96] U.N. Committee Against Torture, “Supplementary reports of States parties due in 1996: Egypt 28/01/99.” CAT/C/34/Add. 11, para. 12. 

[97] Article 42 of the Constitution states: “Any citizen who is arrested or imprisoned or whose freedom is restricted in any way must be treated in a manner conducive to the preservation of his human dignity. No physical or mental harm shall be inflicted on him…. Any statement which is established to have been made under the influence or threat of anything of the above-mentioned nature shall be considered null and void.” (Cited in Ibid., para. 121). 

[98] Ibid., para. 44. The most recent government report to the CAT, in February 2001, refers to but does not provide the texts of these provisions.  See U.N. Committee Against Torture, “Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties under Article 19 of the Convention, Fourth periodic reports due in 2000, Addendum: Egypt” [CAT/C/55/Add.6, 18 October 2001]).

[99] 1999 report to the CAT, para. 47.

[100] Ibid., para. 132.

[101] Ibid., para. 53.

[102] Ibid., para. 171.

[103] Ibid., para. 173.

[104] Ibid., para. 128.

[105] Ibid., paras. 54 and 132.

[106] Ibid., para. 97(a).

[107] Committee against Torture, Consideration of First Periodic Report of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, CAT/C/SR.91, November 15, 1991. The CAT reiterated its concern about incommunicado interrogation in the U.K.’s second periodic report. See Committee against Torture, Consideration of Second Periodic Report of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, para. 29.


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