Egyptian graduate student home for holiday forcibly disappeared after police interrogation on Monday

Graduate student Ahmed Samir Santawy has been arbitrarily detained and held incommunicado since attending an interrogation session at a police station in New Cairo on Monday, according to a statement published by the Association for the Freedom of Thought and Expression.

Santawy, 29, is studying at Central European University in Austria and was visiting his family in Egypt during an academic holiday. Security forces raided his family’s home in New Cairo on January 23, while Santawy was in Dahab, South Sinai. The officers confiscated the digital video recorder from the house’s CCTV cameras and requested Santawy present himself at the police station in the New Cairo neighborhood of the First Settlement. 

Santawy presented himself at the New Cairo Police Station on January 30 but was told to return on Monday. His lawyer was not allowed to attend Monday’s interrogation, and no one has been able to contact the researcher since he presented himself to police at the station that day.

Santawy’s family has sent a petition to the public prosecutor demanding his release, according to AFTE. The organization has also called on the Interior Ministry to immediately release Santawy.

Describing Santawy’s detention as “illegal,” AFTE asserts that his detention is symptomatic of a systematic pattern of intimidation and harassment of researchers by the Egyptian authorities, pointing to the detention of University of Bologna Egyptian graduate student Patrick George Zaki last year.

Zaki was detained at Cairo International Airport in February 2020 while visiting Egypt. After his arrest, Zaki, a former Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights researcher, was held incommunicado for 24 hours, during which time he was beaten and electrocuted, before appearing at the public prosecutor’s office in his hometown of Mansoura. He remains in police custody on remand detention, pending investigation into charges of spreading false news and calling for unauthorized protests.

Walid al-Shobaky, an Egyptian PhD student at the University of Washington, was ordered held in remand detention after being disappeared for four days in May 2018, following a meeting with a University of Zagazig law professor, Mohamed Nour Farahat, for research purposes.

He was later charged with spreading false news and joining a terror organization and added to Case 441/2018, under which a number of prominent lawyers, bloggers and journalists have been detained. After spending six months in prison, Shobaky was released in December 2018 on probation, the terms of which included that he must be present at a police station for four hours twice per week.

Giulio Regeni, an Italian PhD candidate at University of Cambridge who was researching independent trade unions in Egypt, disappeared from a metro station on January 25, 2016 — the fifth anniversary of the 2011 revolution — while on his way to meet a friend in downtown Cairo. His body was found several days later, on February 3, on the side of a highway on the outskirts of the city bearing marks of severe torture. In December, the contentious nearly five-year-long joint investigation into his muder that has seen Italian prosecutors repeatedly accuse Egyptian officials of deliberately trying to mislead came to an end with a mutual parting of ways, with Cairo asserting that the suspects remain at large and Italian prosecution intending to conclude its own investigation into the murder with five suspects, all of whom belong to the Egyptian security apparatus. 

The Italian prosecution formally requested a trial for four Egyptian security officers at the close of January 2021. The four security officers are accused of kidnapping, conspiracy to murder and grievous bodily harm, Italian news agencies reported, citing a statement from the prosecutors’ office.