Silent vigils, and government insistence that the culprits will be held accountable, continue, reports Mohamed El-Sayed The case of Khaled Said, the 28-year-old man from Alexandria allegedly beaten to death at the hands of the police, continues to make waves home and abroad. The Alexandria Court of Appeals has set the 27 July for the start of the trial of the two policemen, Warrant Officer Mahmoud Salah and Sergeant Awad Ismail, charged with "illegal arrest, using physical torture and brutality" when they tried to detain Said on 6 June. Mohamed Abdel-Aziz, from Al-Nadim Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture and Violence and a member of Said's legal team, expressed anger that five police officers at Sidi Gaber Police Station implicated in the case have been excluded from the charge sheet. "I wonder how they managed to escape. There is very clear evidence, for instance, that Mohamed Thabet, one of the five, fabricated a record of criminal charges against Said," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. Said's legal team, says Abdel-Aziz, has commissioned its own report from forensic experts to challenge the findings of the official forensic examination conducted by the three-man team appointed by the prosecutor-general. The second official autopsy concluded that "Said's death was a result of asphyxiation after swallowing a packet of narcotics". "There were bruises and injuries due to collision with a rough surface, the result of resisting the police, but the injuries were not the cause of his death," the report stated. It also said that traces of drugs had been found in Said's stomach. Said's family and lawyers dismiss the report as a whitewash. They will argue that Said's death was premeditated murder, planned in advance because Said had disseminated mobile video footage of police officers at Sidi Gaber Police Station dividing the spoils of a drug raid among themselves. The Ministry of Interior claims the video shows officers celebrating a successful drug bust after they had "put their life in jeopardy". Support for Said continued on Friday, with hundreds of people responding to a call by the Facebook group "My Name is Khaled Said" to hold silent vigils on the corniches of Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said, Kafr Al-Sheikh, Damietta, Beni Sweif, and in Fayoum. A call for a similar vigil to be held tomorrow has been issued by the group. Hundreds of Egyptian expatriates in the UK, the US and Canada also observed a silent vigil in solidarity with Said last Friday. According to news reports, EU ambassadors in Cairo are due to meet today to discuss developments in Said's case. An earlier statement issued by EU heads of mission expressing concern about the circumstances of Said's death and the discrepancies between eyewitness accounts and the Ministry of Interior's version of events have been widely credited with upping the political ante. Key government officials have continued to depict Said's alleged murder as an isolated incident. Minister of State for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Moufid Shehab this week said that, "Khaled Said's case is not a phenomenon, and it's not a result of a state policy aimed at torturing people." "Said's is an isolated incident, and the state will not tolerate such violations of the law... anyone who assaults a citizen in a police station or violates a human right... will be severely punished." Alieddin Hilal, head of the National Democratic Party's Media Committee, wrote in the daily official Al-Ahram that the government and concerned agencies had "failed to recognise early enough that the case was one of public opinion and could not be dealt with in a bureaucratic way".
