Activist Alaa Abd El Fattah is moved from his cell to an unknown location

Activist Alaa Abd El Fattah was removed from his cell in Tora Prison on Wednesday evening, with his family left unaware of his whereabouts.

Last week Abd El Fattah and 24 co-defendants were referred to stand trial on Sunday at the Institute for Police in Tora on charges of illegal protest.

Although the family had presented requests that a date be set for the hearing, this did not occur until three months after the case was referred to the criminal court, with Abd El Fattah remaining in detention for the whole of this period.

A security source at the Ministry of the Interior denied that Abd El Fattah is being held in an undisclosed location, state-owned Al-Ahram daily newspaper reported on Friday, describing it as a rumor. 

Abd El Fattah was arrested in November, two days after the first demonstration following the passing of the Protest Law banning demonstrations without permits.

Although the organizers released a statement saying they had planned the protest, Abd El Fattah was still accused of doing so.

He was arrested at night in his home, and both he and his wife were beaten.

Activist Mona Seif, his sister, wrote on her Facebook page that they would not know for another couple of days, when they hope to be able to visit him, whether the move is standard procedure or because he has been harmed.

"We haven't been able to communicate with the prison authorities," Sanaa Seif, his younger sister, told Mada Masr. "We are worried about all possible scenarios, of either him being taken away as a disciplinary measure to be tortured, or even psychologically bothered. It is no longer an argument that prominent activists don't get tortured. We've seen how in the same prison, there are prominent activists who were beaten and tortured," she added.

On Friday evening, Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan, the wife of Abd El Fattah, wrote on Twitter, “Do you know what it feels like to have someone detained by the Ministry of Interior? It means that you cannot be assured that he is okay for a single moment. Alaa was taken from his cell yesterday and since then we do not know his whereabouts.”

In another tweet, she wrote, “I would like to remind people who try to reassure us saying nothing will happen to him, that Khaled Saeed and Nagi Kamel were tortured in prison and that [Ahmed] Maher and [Ahmed] Douma and [Mohamed] Adel were beaten on the way to their court hearing.”

The three were allegedly beaten as they were being transferred to court on March 10, and their lawyers walked out of the court in protest.

In January, Abd El Fattah received a suspended one-year jail sentence on charges of torching the campaign headquarters of presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq in 2012.

Abd El Fattah has been imprisoned under each governing authority since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak.

In a published letter to his sisters in December, he wrote, “What is adding to the oppression that I feel, is that I find imprisonment is serving no purpose, it is not resistance and there is no revolution ... The previous imprisonments had meaning because I felt that I was in jail by choice.”

“I am sorry for the depressing thoughts ... You know that I hate the whole ‘You are free and imprisonment will not be able to break you’ tone. Every time I am jailed, a piece of me breaks, just like every time someone else is imprisoned, a piece of us breaks. Just like when every martyr dies, we all bleed. It is true that his family and loved ones bleed more, but all of us bleed and all of us pay the price.”