Rights campaign lambasts Interior Ministry for denying forced disappearances

The Freedom for the Brave campaign railed against the Interior Ministry’s recent denial of forced disappearances in a statement the group released on Thursday.

Salah Fouad, the human rights assistant to the interior minister, claimed on Wednesday that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind recent reports that security forces were kidnapping political dissidents. He made the remarks in an interview with the state-owned Middle East News Agency (MENA).

The official challenged critics to prove otherwise.

Such statements are predictable, the Freedom for the Brave statement asserted, as Interior Ministry personnel are never “expected to admit their crimes.”

Fouad’s claims are in keeping with the ministry’s pattern of denying that it employs torture, snipers or rubber bullets, or even that political detainees are being held in Egyptian prisons, the statement added.

The campaign said that it had the evidence Fouad requested — such as the case of Esraa al-Taweel, a young woman who was kidnapped with two friends from a restaurant in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek in June.

After their family and friends reported them missing, the Interior Ministry repeatedly denied that they had been arrested. However, Taweel’s two friends then appeared in Interior Ministry videos confessing that they belonged to a terrorist organization, while she was found at the National Security Agency prosecution office 17 days after she disappeared.

None of the three young people were allowed to contact their families or a lawyer after they were apprehended, the statement claimed.

It also cited the case of Islam Khalil, who was secretly detained for 122 days until he appeared before the Alexandria prosecution. His family was never informed of his whereabouts.

In the MENA interview, Fouad said that merely citing the number of people who have gone missing was of no help — the ministry needed to be given actual names, “instead of just creating a state of confusion.”

In response, Freedom for the Brave said that those names were recorded in the complaints filed at police stations and with prosecutors by the families of missing people. The National Council for Human Rights also previously said that it had received around 50 reports of missing family members, the statement added.

The names are also included in reports by different NGOs, the statement said. On Monday, the Stop Forced Disappearances campaign launched by the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms issued a report listing the names of 215 people who had been forcibly disappeared by security personnel.

The report said that only 63 of these people have been located, while the whereabouts of the remaining 152 are still unknown.

One name that has recently come to the forefront is Mostafa Massouny, who family and friends allege was kidnapped by security forces in June.

His family only found out he was being investigated by National Security Agency officers at their headquarters in Cairo's Lazoghly Square when his coworkers contacted his sister, saying the officers had called his workplace to confirm his employment.

On Wednesday night, Abu Bakr Abdel Karim, the public relations assistant to the interior minister, denied that Massouny had been detained. He claimed that a woman had fraudulently called the missing young man’s office pretending to work for National Security.

Massouny’s name isn’t listed in any morgue, prison or police reports, according to the Freedom for the Brave Facebook page. Social media users started a campaign to shed light on his case under the hashtag “Where is Massouny?” (#ماصوني_فين).

If these names “aren’t enough for the ministry or the prosecution,  they only have to open prisons, Central Security Forces camps, police stations and National Security Agency headquarters for surprise inspection visits by rights groups,” Freedom for the Brave declared. “Only then will the disappeared reappear.”