Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution by John R. Bradley

Author:John R. Bradley [Bradley, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781403984777
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

Magda Adly, the director of the Al-Nadim Center for the Psychological Treatment and Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence, later said that Mohammed's family told her he had both electrical burns and burns that seemed to come from a heated object. His brother said Mohammed had been tortured with a heating coil. "The boy was beaten, electrocuted. When he screamed and went into convulsions, the officer kicked him in the chest, and that appears to have damaged his lungs," Adly concluded. The coma, she said, could have been caused either by blood poisoning or head trauma from the terrible beatings he must have endured.

His mother told reporters that the doctors who initially examined the body to issue the death certificate also suspected he died of unnatural causes and advised her to go to a prosecutor. One prosecutor wept when he saw the body, she added; and he had it transferred to the Mansoura University Hospital morgue. A preliminary autopsy showed the direct cause of death was pulmonary infection. That may indeed have been true. However, the question the mother said she wanted answered by the doctors was what brought it on. She said she refused to accept the autopsy result or to have the body released for burial. Senior local officials and policemen then "tried to bribe me and other times to threaten me so as not to file a complaint," she alleged, offering her two hundred dollars—a large sum for a poor, illiterate head of a large family. But it was not enough to persuade this proud, heartbroken woman to let the matter rest.

Tired of the negotiations, it is alleged police then simply whisked the body away from the morgue without telling the mother. They buried the boy, apparently while her other son Ibrahim, who was still in custody, was sitting in the back of a police pickup truck looking on. Was this an implicit warning to him to tell his mother to shut up or he, too, would be killed?

Ibrahim, meanwhile, was also claiming that he had been tortured by police, who threatened to fabricate a drug charge against him unless he testified that the burn marks on his brother's body were the lingering effect of a live electric cable that just happened to fall on him six months before he was detained. Thinking Mohammed was still alive, Ibrahim agreed. But by the time of the burial, the Muslim Brotherhood had posted the video on their Web site, and the case was attracting enormous publicity—not just in the Egyptian opposition media, which routinely exposes alleged torture cases in graphic detail, but also briefly in the usually uninterested international media. Ibrahim retracted his testimony and the prosecutor-general's office, in a departure from practice, announced it would investigate the case further. It exhumed Mohammed's body for more testing. Hamdi Al-Baz, the family's lawyer, said there were "clear circumstances here calling for the body to be reexamined," and cited a report made by the health inspector while the boy was first hospitalized which said torture was involved.

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