Egyptians with a bone to pick with Saudi Arabia after complaints of humiliating treatment by the airline while in Jedda join forces with families of Egyptians in legal limbo detained in Saudi Arabia Activists demonstrated in front of the Saudi embassy in Giza, Cairo this Sunday afternoon to express their anger over the treatment of Egyptian pilgrims at Saudi Arabia's Jeddah airport upon their return. The activists presented a statement to the Saudi ambassador in Cairo, Ahmed Abdel Aziz Kattan, which they also distributed to newspapers and websites. The statement condemned the humiliation of the Egyptian pilgrims at the airport and attacked the Saudi airlines excuse that the Jeddah airport and the Saudi airlines had record delays and chaos at the airport. The strongly-worded statement also attacked the Saudi ambassador's comments to the effect that the Egyptian media is in crisis as well as his blaming the Egyptian pilgrims for the chaos. The families of Egyptians in Saudi Arabia who claim they were detained for no reason are going to join in the pilgrims' sit-in to demand information on the fate of their relatives. They threatened, furthermore, to take their case to Egyptian courts if they didn't hear from the embassy about their detained relatives. A point in case: one of the protesting pilgrims, an Egyptian engineer named Hamed Mohamed Ali, was detained at the airport and reportedly taken to the ministry of interior. Up to the time of print Saudi authorities have not issued a statement explaining why he was detained or his whereabouts. A separate group of activists in Alexandria have called for a solidarity protest in front of the Saudi consulate there today Sunday at 5pm.
