Twelve-year-old Mohammed Abdelaziz’s brother said he screamed in pain as he was tortured in Egyptian police custody, but his screams are now silent.
Pictures recently published on a popular Egyptian blog showed Mohammed dead with signs of torture all over his skinny little body.
Others showed Mohammed, who passed away on Sunday, unconscious at a hospital in a village near the Egyptian city of Mansoura, about 120km from the Egyptian capital, Cairo.
”Policemen tortured my child, snatched his dead body, then buried him at dawn without informing his family,” the mother of the dead boy bitterly told the Egyptian al-Masry al-Youm independent newspaper.
The boy was arrested almost two weeks ago on suspicion of theft. He spent 10 days in a Mansoura police station where he was beaten up and tortured for 10 consecutive days, according to his brother, Ibrahim (20), who had earlier been held in custody for possessing a jackknife.
”I and more than 100 other prisoners saw the policemen beating up my brother using electricity and a chain while he was screaming in pain,” Ibrahim added.
The brother said he was threatened by police officers that they would fabricate a drugs case against him if he didn’t testify that the burn marks on his brother’s body resulted from an electric cable that fell on him six months ago — before he was held in prison.
Ibrahim, who belongs to a poor family, said he didn’t know that his brother had died before he signed the testimony. Then he was forced to attend his brother’s burial at dawn while he was kept in a police truck.
”A parliamentarian, the village mayor and senior police officers took part in covering up my son’s murder,” the mother told independent al-Dostour newspaper.
Though he was later released, the older brother couldn’t keep the secret. A lawyer filed a complaint with the district attorney on the family’s behalf, requesting an autopsy.
Investigation
On Friday, al-Dostour reported that the district attorney ordered a forensic investigation into the case. The report added that the DA unveiled the fact that the documents of the boy’s case did not include any autopsy or medical reports as the Interior Ministry had earlier claimed in a statement.
Meanwhile, al-Dostour further reported that funeral prayers in the boy’s village were prevented to avoid any reactions on the villagers’ part. Seven special security forces and a fire truck have been sealing off the police station.
Also in Mansoura, the district attorney ordered on Wednesday that four police officers were to be imprisoned pending further investigation into the killing of a villager, the state-run Egyptian Gazette newspaper reported.
The police officers were suspected of torturing to death in April the 37-year-old Nasr Ahmed Abdullah who lived in another Mansoura village, the report added. Nasr was jailed with no charge. Policemen pressured him to reveal where his wanted brother was hiding, media reports said.
The two cases come after a series of violations of which Egyptian police officers have been accused.
The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) recently issued a report titled Torture in Egypt: Criminals Escaping Punishment Issued as Part of EOHR’s Continued Campaign to Put an End to This Horrific Crime.
The report describes cases of torture and mistreatment inside police stations occurring between 1993 and July 2007, which were documented by the EOHR’s fieldwork unit using the victims’ testimonies, complaints presented by their relatives, public prosecution office investigations, forensic and other medical reports, the EOHR explained.
More than 567 cases of torture inside police stations have been documented, including 167 deaths, which the EOHR strongly suspects were the result of torture and mistreatment.
”These cases are merely a limited sample amongst hundreds of other cases received by EOHR,” the report noted.
According to London-based Amnesty International, torture in detention is systematic in Egypt and, in the majority of cases, the perpetrators are not brought to justice. — Sapa-dpa