ANHRI: Blogger Mohamed Oxygen attempted suicide in detention before Eid al-Adha

Mohamed Ibrahim, a blogger who has been held in remand detention since September 2019, attempted suicide in detention in July after months of being deprived of visits from his family or lawyers. 

The director of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), whose lawyers represent Ibrahim, told Mada Masr that a few days before the Eid al-Adha holidays he was moved from his cell at Tora Prison Complex to a hospital after overdosing on sleeping pills.

Ibrahim, who is known online as Mohamed Oxygen, fell ill after taking the pills and his cell mates called for help, said the ANHRI Director Gamal Eid, after which prison authorities moved him to the hospital. Oxygen has since recovered, he told Mada Masr. 

In a Sunday statement, ANHRI announced that Ibrahim had attempted suicide, describing it as a result of “maltreatement” on the part of authorities at Section II of Tora Prison Maximum Security Prison, where Ibrahim is held. 

Ibrahim has been prevented from receiving visitors for months and was not permitted to access cash that his family delivers to him so that he can make purchases at the prison’s canteen, Eid told Mada Masr. According to ANHRI, it has been 15 months since his family were allowed to visit. His lawyers have also been unable to visit him to check on  his “physical, mental and psychological well-being,” the statement said. 

Ibrahim’s suicide is yet another example of what several local and international human rights organizations, the United Nations, and press reports say are extremely poor conditions in Egypt’s prisons and detention centers. 

Issues with the provision of medical attention are frequently documented in detention facilities. Detained former presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh suffers regular attacks due to a heart complaint, while jailed senior Muslim Brotherhood figure Mohamed al-Beltagy had a stroke in 2019 for which his family said he was not hospitalized. In the most prominent case, rights organizations flagged the insufficient provision of medical care to former president Mohamed Morsi as a factor in his 2019 death in detention. Questions were also raised around the death in detention of 24-year-old filmmaker Shady Habash, whose health condition deteriorated after he ingested ethyl alcohol in his cell last year. 

Ibrahim has been held since September 2019 when he was arrested alongside thousands of others in a security campaign launched after the self-exiled construction contractor-turned actor Mohamed Ali called for public protests over alleged corruption and mismanagement of public funds by the president and the Armed Forces. He was charged with “membership in a banned group, spreading false news, and misusing social media.” In November 2020, Oxygen was ordered released by a criminal court, but one week after the release order the Public Prosecution detained him on charges in another case, sidestepping the release order. 

Ibrahim was also held in remand for more than a year between April 2018 and June 2019. He was arrested in 2018 after reporting on government opposition figures and irregularities in Egypt’s 2018 presidential election on his blog, Oxygen Egypt, as CPJ documented at the time.