A Human Rights Watch report on mass arrests and torture in Sinai offered a chilling account of the repercussions of last October's Taba bombings. Amira Howeidy reports The New York-based international rights group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), released a 43-page report on Tuesday documenting mass arrests and torture in Sinai following the 7 October bombings at the Taba Hilton and two Sinai tourist camps, which killed 34 people, and injured 159. Two weeks after the bombings, the Interior Ministry identified the assailants as nine Sinai residents; five were in custody, two were killed in the attack, and two remained at large. The ministry said the ringleader -- one of the two suspects killed during the bombings -- was Iyad Said Salah, a Palestinian with a criminal record who had turned to Islamist extremism, provoked by the Israeli incursion into Rafah at the time into carrying out the attack. Although the ministry announced that the investigation now boiled down to a hunt for the two remaining suspects, subsequent events revealed a far wider security operation was actually taking place. At least three Egyptian human rights groups documented that mass arrests continued until early December. According to these groups, 2,500 to 3,000 people were detained without charges. The impact of this revelation, made just two months ago, was short lived, limited to a few reports in the opposition press; other news -- from the release of an Israeli spy to Coptic-Muslim tension in Upper Egypt -- soon drove the story into the background. Joe Stork, the Washington-based director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division, told Al-Ahram Weekly that Egyptian human rights groups had "opened a brief window" on the case, "then it was shut again. We are trying to open the window." Stork wrote HRW's Mass Arrests and Torture in Sinai report, and carried out its research with Ahmed Seif El-Islam, director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, and Aida Seif El-Dawla, chair of the Egyptian Association Against Torture. They visited Sinai in mid-December for two days, interviewing former detainees, and eyewitnesses to arrests in Al-Arish. In every one of the score of cases HRW investigated, the State Security Investigation (SSI) apparatus had detained individuals without informing them of the reason why. They were usually arrested in pre- dawn raids (many during the month of Ramadan), and those who were picked up were usually held for three days to one week without being charged. While some were released, most were transferred to Tora prison in Cairo and Damanhour Prison in the Nile Delta, the report said. Most of the detainees were Islamists, or thought to be. "This suggests that the official statement [issued by the Interior Ministry on the Sinai bombings] did not fully reflect the investigation into the attacks," the report said, "or that the government was using the occasion to carry out a much broader crackdown against potential opponents, particularly identified as having Islamist sympathies." HRW said it interviewed several former detainees who provided "credible accounts of torture" at the hands of SSI investigators; others spoke of seeing other detainees who had been badly tortured. The report included horrifying testimonies from two of the detainees. 26-year- old Hamid Batrawi, whose four brothers were already in custody, was arrested on 22 November while driving from Al-Arish to southern Sinai. He was taken to a police station near Suez, and then transferred to the SSI headquarters there. Upon his arrival, the SSI officers asked why he had not mentioned that his brothers had been arrested. He was then stripped to his underpants, his hands tied behind his back, and hung by his hands from the top of an iron door, "causing excruciating pain to his shoulders". With his toes just touching the floor, which was wet, wires were attached to his toes and underpants. He was then beaten with a hose, and administered jolts of electricity every couple of minutes; the shock intensified when his toes rested on the wet floor. This continued for about four and a half hours, after which he was transferred to Suez hospital. When Seif El-Dawla visited him in hospital, she said he could not talk, see or walk. The second detainee, Abdel-Nour Sayed (not his real name) was picked up from his home at 3am on 18 October; he was held with 200 other detainees for six days in small rooms with no toilet facilities. He told HRW that he was tortured during his first interrogation session upon the orders of a man "who did not speak" and who "was not Egyptian". Although the report does not address the possible involvement of non-Egyptian interrogators, Sayed's words re-triggered questions about the nature of Israel's role in the investigation. Egypt allowed the Israeli army to enter the area immediately after the bombings to help with rescue operations, official statements at the time said. Mass Arrests and Torture in Sinai was released during a well-attended press conference at the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre; significantly, around a dozen female relatives of the detainees had come to Cairo from Sinai for the event. Iman Ahmed Himdan said that security forces stormed her house looking for her husband Ahmed Abdallah Himdan, who was at large. "When they didn't find my husband at home, they took my 16-year-old brother, and started threatening him, and calling him indecent names," Himdan, who wears a black niqab (face veil), said. "The police didn't know I was Ahmed's wife, but when I saw my little brother go through this, I was provoked, and shouted, 'I'm Ahmed's wife, leave my brother alone.' So they took both of us," she told the Weekly. The couple had only been married for three months, and Himdan was two months pregnant. "We were taken to the SSI north Sinai headquarters. My brother was blindfolded, stripped, and beaten severely. Both of us were threatened with electrocution if we didn't tell them where my husband was. We were held for a week, during which I had a nervous breakdown, and an abortion." Himdan and her brother were only released when her husband handed himself in. He's still in custody, she said. Himdan's cousin, Samah Abu Shita, had a similar experience when police stormed her house "from the window, the balcony and door", during which they stepped on her four-month-old baby girl, and broke one of her ribs. "Our men have done nothing but live as committed, practicing Muslims; they have nothing to do with any illegal activity, and they haven't been charged with anything," she said. Her husband and four brothers have been in custody since November. According to the HRW report, only 100 detainees have been released; some 2,400 remain in detention. Other victims of the post-Taba bombing security crackdown include the director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, Ahmed Seif El-Islam, who told reporters at Tuesday's press conference that his house was broken into, and his laptop stolen, at around the same time that the centre issued its initial report on the Sinai arrests. "Back then I thought it was just a burglary," he said. But then, on Monday 21 February, his house was broken into again -- this time in broad daylight at noon. His new laptop was stolen, and all of his papers thoroughly searched. "I got the message," he said, "and this is my reply: I will not be silenced, and I will gladly give my blood for freedom." The press conference fell into a shocked silence. "There is this disregard, this lawlessness, on the part of the security services that even goes beyond the emergency law, that the authorities have not addressed," Stork told the Weekly. "They have not investigated these abuses, as far as we know, or prosecuted anybody. This issue of impunity is a very important one." Since December, Stork's requests to meet with Egyptian officials have been ignored; only on the eve of the press conference, on Monday at "midnight", was he informed that he would be meeting with officials at the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General. In what appears to be a coordinated government reaction to the HRW report, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Tuesday taking issue with HRW for not notifying the authorities in advance about the report, "to allow time for a studied response". That HRW issued this report based on fieldwork, the statement said, "demonstrates Egypt's openness and transparency in human rights issues". It rejected HRW's recommendation that the Egyptian government cancel the emergency law, arguing that only the "Egyptian people have the legitimate right to end the emergency law though their representatives in parliament". It said that only five people were held in custody in connection with the Taba bombings.
