Thugs killed two police officers last week in separate incidents less than 24 hours apart. Mustafa El-Menshawy investigates Three men alleged to be drug dealers shot and killed police officer Tamer Abdel-Fadil in Qalyubiya on 28 December. The next day, another police officer, Mohamed Shaarawi, was stabbed to death in Kirdasa, Giza, by one of three brothers whom he was in the process of arresting for alleged drug dealing. Abdel-Fadil had also just arrested an alleged drug dealer when the first incident occurred. The two deaths have catalysed much commentary and criticism of the relationship between the police and its network of criminal informants. "Some thugs feel like they are part of the Interior Ministry," said lawyer and human rights activist Mohamed Munir. "No wonder they have the guts to open fire on police officers and frisk people in the street." Kirdasa resident Shaaban Mohamed said the three brothers who were involved in the Shaarawi shooting had been "acting like policemen, setting up mock checkpoints in the street, and arresting people at gunpoint," for the past few years. He said that less than a week before Shaarawi was killed, a junior officer had been sent to the neighbourhood to arrest the three brothers; after they threatened him with knives and took his gun, Mohamed said, the young policeman ran away. After Shaarawi was killed, the police came down hard on the three brothers, who were holed up in a Kirdasa house. Although a prolonged gunfight ended with the three men dead, Mohamed blamed the police for doing too little, too late. "We have been living in hell for years," he said. In fact, the Interior Ministry has been widely accused of being lax about bringing drug dealers and other criminals to justice. A colleague of Shaarawi's, speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly on strict condition of anonymity, said police had "too many cases to look into", and that "the prisons were already overcrowded with criminals." A further problem, the source said, was that some thugs are used as informers by police officers, a dynamic that he said could provide these criminal elements with free rein to further break the law. Many analysts agreed. "The strategy of employing people with criminal records as informers has backfired, with police officers becoming more vulnerable to attacks by the thugs themselves," Munir said. In Kirdasa, where Shaarawi was killed, residents said the three thugs in question had always claimed that they were highly connected to senior police officers. While a senior security source dismissed these claims as baseless, Shaarawi's colleague said the three thugs who killed him could have been his informers. Human rights activist Ahmed Seifel-Islam, meanwhile, questioned whether or not the two officers who were killed last week had previously "detained any of the killers without charges, or tortured them", raising suspicions that the killings could have been acts of revenge. In fact, the three assailants who shot Shaarawi had extensive criminal records. "One of them had been convicted of hooliganism and drug dealing 11 times, another's record sported eight drug dealing convictions, and the third was recently released from prison," Shaarawi's colleague said. The Interior Ministry initially set its sights on thugs after a September 1999 penknife attack on President Hosni Mubarak in Port Said. It confiscated knives, swords, iron chains, sulfuric acid and pistols -- all favourites for thugs -- and closed down a slew of workshops that manufacture such illegal weapons. A 1998 law also makes hooliganism punishable by a minimum one-year prison term; if a victim dies, the sentence can be as harsh as the death penalty. These measures, however, seem to have failed to stem the damage, if the crime pages of the papers are anything to go by. Just a few days after last week's high profile incidents, a gang wielding knives attacked a police patrol car outside the Foreign Ministry building in Boulaq. Last September, police officer Sobhi Hafez was shot dead in Menufiya by a criminal who had previously been convicted 26 times. Fouad Allam, a former head of state security, told the Weekly that "people feel deep frustration and resentment towards the government, and have been taking revenge by attacking police officers, who are seen as representatives of the government." Human rights groups have been stressing for quite some time now that, in general, relations between police officers and citizens need much improvement. According to Seifel-Islam, the Interior Ministry has to stop using "torture, which still regularly takes place at all police stations, not just against those being accused of crimes, but against their families as well." For the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights, which released a report on police behaviour in 2003, several issues are interconnected. The arbitrary arrests of citizens, and their subsequently being compelled to admit to crimes they had not committed, had resulted in a great number of real "perpetrators escaping from punishment", the report said. Some police officers, on the other hand, complained that the Interior Ministry's recent nod to human rights groups -- by establishing an internal human rights committee and putting an increasing number of police officers on trial for violations -- had actually limited their ability to effectively deal with thugs. Allam dismissed these excuses, insisting that there has always been a ministry ombudsman charged with monitoring police officers' performance. Allam said that "for police to maintain their status and dignity on the street, the government must deal with the lack of social justice, the high rates of unemployment, and the weak economy -- all some of what I believe are root causes of what happened last week."
