The fatal shooting of a 19-year-old in Alexandria has drawn attention to the conduct of police officers at Al-Montazah Police Station, reports Salonaz Sami "They shot him in the head," said Sabah Abdel-Qader, mother of 19-year- old Youssef Khamis. And then, to add insult to injury, the authorities "accused my son of drug trafficking". Eye-witnesses report that Khamis, a recent vocational institute graduate, was walking down Abdel-Hamid Street around 12pm on 25 March with two friends when a plain-clothed policeman from Al-Montazah Police Station stopped him to search him. "When Khamis refused to be searched the policeman took out his gun and shot him in the head," said one witness. "It all happened in less than a minute." Two days later, Ramzi Thaalab, head of Alexandria's criminal investigation department, said that Khamis and his two friends were drug dealers and that the police officer had been attacked by Khamis's dog during the incident. It was the dog, said Thaalab, at which the policeman had aimed, hitting Khamis by mistake. While some eye-witnesses confirmed there was a small dog with one of the boys, others denied it. Lawyers' Syndicate's council member Hassan Sobhi, acting for the family of the deceased, says two of Khamis's older brothers, Ibrahim and Madgy, rushed immediately to the scene of the shooting when they heard the news, only to find their brother lying on the floor in a pool of blood. "When we tried to take him to the nearest hospital the police told us that we were not allowed to touch him. They started to hit us and then took us to the police station," Ibrahim told Al-Ahram Weekly. Neighbours informed the boys' father, who rushed to the police station to find that his sons had been severely beaten. They were later released, and with their father headed back to the scene of the shooting where the 19-year-old was still lying on the ground. They then took him by ambulance to the university hospital. Khamis was then left for more than four hours lying on a stretcher in the hospital corridor during which time, says Sobhi, his family was denied access to him. Finally medical officials advised his family to take him to another hospital: his heart was still beating but he needed artificial respiration using equipment the university hospital did not possess. "How could it be that Alexandria's main hospital, to which patients come from all over Egypt, does not have basic equipment for artificial respiration?" asked Sobhi. "And why did it take the hospital more than four hours to discover this fact?" Sobhi says the family then proceeded to contact other hospitals in the area, none of which agreed to accept the gunshot victim, citing a lack of the necessary equipment. "Witnesses in the hospital have told us that the systematic rejections were a result of phone calls exchanged between police officers and medical officials," said Sobhi. Meanwhile Khamis's friends, Abdallah Mohamed and Ihab Zaki, present during the shooting, were referred to the prosecution for interrogation at 2am without a lawyer being present. They were accused of drug trafficking and remanded in custody for four days pending investigation. "Mohamed and Zaki are both minors -- they should not have been referred to prosecution in the first place, let alone remanded in custody for four days," said Sobhi. During Khamis's funeral the next day eight people were arrested and charged with rioting and attempting to destroy the police station. "None of the eight is older than 17 years," Sobhi said. Sobhi voiced concerns that none of the lawyers involved in the cases has been given access to case files, a flagrant breach of criminal procedure law and the instructions of the prosecutor-general. Further, after Mohamed, Zaki and the other eight persons charged in the rioting case were remanded in custody for four days they were referred the next day to a tribunal without their lawyers being notified. "We found out by coincidence," said Sobhi. "And at the court it was obvious that all 10 of them had been very badly beaten. We insisted they be examined by a forensic team to document the fact that they had been beaten while in police custody." The two cases, says Sobhi, are the tip of the iceberg. "We receive complaints all the time about the brutality of the Al-Montazah station's officers," he said. "Nor are the police officers the only culpable parties," he added. It is the prosecution that has responsibility for overseeing the conduct of police officers. "What is so difficult now is that they are accusing him of being a drug dealer, and God knows that he is not," Khamis's father told the Weekly. "All I want is my son's name cleared so that he can rest in peace." Meanwhile Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood MP, has petitioned the minister of interior to investigate the case, while fellow MP El-Mohammady Said Ahmed presented an urgent request to parliament for the same. Both cases will be referred to the courts this month.
