For publishing footage alleging to show torture, nine sentenced to life by terrorism court

After two video clips emerged this year claiming to show evidence of Egyptian police torturing detainees inside a Cairo police station, a court ruled last month that nine men charged with filming and sharing the video be imprisoned for life.

Eight of them are held within detention facilities inside the country, while the ninth, a US resident, was sentenced in absentia on charges of sharing the video online via his YouTube channel. 

The videos emerged in January, purporting to show prisoners being beaten and tortured by security personnel in Cairo, and are thought to have been filmed in November 2021 in a police station in the city’s eastern Salam City district. According to experts consulted at the time by the UK-based newspaper The Guardian, the detainees’ injuries and the use of stress positions are consistent with documented examples of torture in detention centers.

One video showed detainees stripped down to their underwear and left to hang from a metal grate by their arms, while the other shows detainees in a crowded cell displaying multiple bruises and wounds on their bodies to the camera.

The Supreme State Security Prosecution began investigating the leak, according to a report from EFHR. Some of the detainees in the videos were questioned, as were those suspected of leaking and publishing the video, and the officers accused of torture were questioned as witnesses.

Some defendants were forcibly disappeared for days before being added to the case, said the report, and some were questioned without lawyers to represent them.

Less than a month after the videos were published, the Public Prosecution announced that its investigations determined that the video was “staged.” According to the official statement, the defendants planned the whole incident, assaulting themselves with metal rods and staging the video after being instigated by “others inside and outside the country, [who wish to] destabilize [Egypt] and stir up conflict by spreading false news.”

A terrorism circuit of the Badr Criminal Court proceeded to try 23 people in relation to the case on charges of “joining and financing a terrorist group, broadcasting false news, participating by agreeing and helping in broadcasting false news, and possessing and obtaining two recording and broadcasting devices (mobile phones) to record and broadcast the false news.”

In its November 17 ruling, the court sentenced nine of the defendants to life imprisonment, 13 others were sentenced to 15 years and seventeen-year-old Tamer Khaled Abdel Aziz was handed a five-year sentence, the Egyptian Front for Human Rights said, citing rights lawyers who were present to observe the ruling.

YouTuber Ali Hussein al-Mahdy, who disseminated the videos via his YouTube channel which has around 300,000 followers, was handed a life sentence in absentia. 

All of the defendants were also added to the state terrorism list and are to undergo police probation for five years after release.

Lawyers for the 22 defendants inside Egypt are likely to appeal the sentences at the Cassation Court, said Ahmed Nadeem, a lawyer working for the Egyptian Front for Human Rights.

Mahdy, who has multiple other cases against him and who has resided outside the country since claiming asylum in the US in 2019, said that he has no plans to challenge the ruling. “No one from the government or from the court informed me at all,” he said, adding that he plans to continue talking about the human rights situation in Egypt since “there is no other solution.”