The left -wing activist, a figure of the 2011 revolution, refuses to eat for fifty days. He has spent eight of the past nine years in prison.
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Even behind bars, Alaa Abdel Fattah remains a thorn in the foot for the Egyptian power. After having published You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (“You have not yet been defeated”, Fitzcarraldo, not translated), in October 2021, with the complicity of his own, the 40 -year -old left -wing activist, who has passed since 2013 most of his time in prison, led, on Monday, May 23, his fifty-second day of hunger strike. Transferred Wednesday, May 18 from the High Security Prison of Tora, Cairo, he now leads this struggle to the new detention center of Wadi Natroun, presented as a model by the authorities.
At the end of the line, Laila Soueif, her mother, lets her relief burst after visiting her: “We will continue to fight for the release of Alaa. But, at least, he can receive health care In Wadi Natroun. He is physically weak, but he is better emotionally. “According to his family, Alaa Abdel Fattah was able to sleep on a mattress on Wednesday evening, for the first time for a long time.
His mother hopes that he will have access to books and will be able to get out of his cell, “the rights which were denied to him in Tora”. Wadi Natroun’s prison, located 150 kilometers northwest of the Egyptian capital, is more distant. But for the mathematician, herself is a committed left, “the important thing is that LAA is in better conditions of detention, and that he is not subject to a personal vendetta of the penitentiary authorities, as it was The case in Torah “.
This computer scientist was a pioneer of the Egyptian blogosphere and a face of the 2011 revolution, who had overthrown Hosni Mubarak before the return to power of the army, in 2013. He was sentenced in December 2021 to five years prison for “dissemination of false information”. His defense had not had access to his file. In Egypt directed with an iron fist by President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Alaa Abdel Fattah, father of a young boy, had been arrested again in 2019, while he was under judicial supervision. In the wake of rare demonstrations against power, a large draft had struck civil society.
“His transfer reports that there was a decision, at the level of the authorities, to play de -escalation,” said Laila Soueif. With her two daughters, she is a tireless voice of the fate of Alaa and the other political detainees in Egypt. Egyptian mothers of prisoners also signed a petition in solidarity in Alaa Abdel Fattah. “The national and international pressure has the effect. Alaa must be released without conditions: even in Wadi Natroun, his detention remains arbitrary”, pleads Hussein Bayoumi, of Amnesty International.
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