Police officers accused of fatally shooting 2 brothers in Suez

Two police officers in Suez face charges of premeditated murder for allegedly shooting two brothers to death on Monday morning. The prosecution has ordered the suspects into custody for four days pending investigations, the privately owned news site Youm7 reported on Tuesday.

Mohamed and Ahmed Seoudi were driving their motorbike to work around 8 am on Monday morning when they came upon a police patrol force, their uncle Gharib Mehled told Mada Masr. The two men purportedly then swerved onto a small side street “to avoid the usual police harassment” when one officer followed them, then shot them both in the head at close range.

“They were respectable young men, and their motorbike was registered and carried the license plate number 23235 SUEZ, contrary to rumors that it was not licensed,” Mehled argued.

One of the men was 26 and was supposed to get married in two months, while his 22-year-old brother was a wrestling champion who trained in an army establishment, as proven by his identification card, the uncle asserted.

A Facebook user by the name Mahmoud Shawky was allegedly present at the scene of the crime and posted photos of the two men after they were shot.

“One of them was an army soldier on vacation and the other was a roman wrestling champion,” Shawky wrote in mourning. 

“By nature, people in Egypt are scared when they see the police instead of feeling safe. The [victims] ran away, so they were shot in the head out of mere suspicion,” he added.

In another post, Shawky claimed that after the victims were shot, the officer kicked their bodies until he was sure they were dead.

“Running away was definitely wrong, but they didn’t deserve to be executed on the spot,” Shawky wrote.

The Suez prosecution office confiscated the bullets that killed the victims and ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death. Meanwhile, the victims's family gathered at the Suez morgue to protest the incident, the privately owned newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm (AMAY) reported.

On Monday night, funeral proceedings for the two men turned into a demonstration that headed toward the security directorate.

“The police attacked the funeral using tear gas to disperse the gathering, and one of the bodies almost caught fire in the process,” Mehled claimed.

On Tuesday, the prosecution reportedly questioned the defendants for 10 hours. The officers claimed that the shooting was an accident, as they had “fired a few shots in the air which accidentally hit the victims,” AMAY reported.

Mehled denounced the arrest of the two officers, “even though it’s clear which one of them shot the victims.” He believes that implicating both of officers in the case is an attempt to spread the guilt so that they both walk free.

Karim Ennarah, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), told Mada Masr that he found the prosecution’s decision to charge the defendants unusual, since similar cases have “often died in the prosecutor's office.”

Monday’s incident is part of a widespread pattern of police behavior since the 2011 revolution, Ennarah claimed.

“This is a recent form of police brutality where security forces find it acceptable to use brutal and disproportionate force against citizens who hadn’t provided them with any reason for using firearms,” he argued.

Ennarah believes that such practices are far from any logical definition of appropriate force, and should be considered premeditated murder.

An EIPR report on police brutality issued in 2013, as well as an upcoming report due for release later in January 2015, have listed a number of incidents where citizens who attempted to bypass or escape checkpoints were assaulted by security personnel using firearms.

In October 2012, police in the north Sinai city of Arish shot at a taxi driver attempting to escape a checkpoint. The driver died and a passenger was injured.

In January 2012, a microbus driver was also shot dead by a low-ranking police officer in Alexandria after the two fought over a minor car collision. The officer was later released on LE5,000 bail.

“Innocent citizens are often also collateral damage even when the police have valid reason for using firearms,” Ennarah added. “During a recent police raid in Shubra, the police fired excessive and random shots which claimed the lives of two citizens standing on their balcony.”