Prosecutor orders release of 40 Cairo University students detained for past 8 months

The public prosecution has ordered the release of 40 Cairo University students held in custody for the past eight months on suspicion of involvement in on-campus clashes with security forces, the Freedom for the Brave campaign said in a statement issued Thursday.

The students were reportedly cleared of the charges after the prosecution’s investigations showed they had no relationship to the violent events that occurred on January 16, according to the campaign’s statement.

Lawyers working on the case told Mada Masr that the prosecution ordered the students to be released after 48 hours.

Activists and friends of the detainees said they were arrested randomly during clashes between police forces and students identified as belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood group. Some of the students were purportedly arrested off-campus.

The detained students faced murder charges for the death of fellow student Sherif al-Sawy and the attempted murder of 27 others, as well as protesting without permission and vandalizing university property.

Since their arrest eight months ago, the students’ detention period was repeatedly extended without reason, and their case was never referred to trial.

They were initially held in a Central Security Forces camp — which is not a legal detention facility for civilians — and were later transferred to Wadi al-Natrun prison. One of the students, Abdel Rahma Fouad, wrote a letter from prison describing repeated acts of torture there.

The letter — which Fouad wrote under his nickname, Boushkash — recounted that security forces burned their clothes and books and crammed the students into overcrowded cells with 25 prisoners per room. He alleged that the prison guards forced the students to sing pro-military songs, torturing those who refused.

“Daily physical inspection is very demeaning. Sometimes it looks like sexual harassment. There is periodic inspection to the prison cells every three days, where food and drinks are thrown on the floor, clothes are torn and in some cases prisoners are beaten,” Fouad wrote.

The students’ case is similar to that of two Alexandria University professors Sherif Farag and Mahmoud Abdel Wahed, who were also jailed for eight months for violating the Protest Law. They were released in late July when the prosecution found that they and 14 other detainees had no connection to incident in question.