The Egyptian government should order military police, army officers, and State Security Investigations officers to cease arresting journalists, activists, and protesters arbitrarily, Human Rights Watch said today. Army officers and military police arbitrarily detained at least 119 people since the army took up positions in Egyptian cities and towns on the night of January 28, 2011, and in at least five cases tortured them. The government needs to ensure the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the illegal detentions and torture and ill-treatment which have occurred, Human Rights Watch said. In the cases Human Rights Watch has documented, those detained, who have since been released, said that they were held incommunicado, did not have access to a lawyer, and could not inform their families about their detention. “Arrests by military police of journalists, human rights defenders, and youth activists since January 31 appear intended to intimidate reporting and undermine support for the Tahrir protest,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “These arrests and reports of abuse in detention are exactly the types of practices that sparked the demonstrations in the first place.” Egyptian army forces deployed on the streets of Egyptian cities and towns late on January 28, after the police withdrew. Since then, military police and army officers arrested or detained at least 97 journalists, activists, and protesters, according to the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters (FDP), a coalition of Egyptian human rights organizations. The group has documented a list of 69 people arrested so far and has confirmed the release of only 29 to date. Most of these arrests have been short-term, lasting under 24 hours; some have lasted as long as two days. Arrests of Protesters Since January 31, Human Rights Watch has documented the arbitrary arrest by military police of at least 20 protesters who were leaving or heading to Tahrir Square. Most of these arrests occurred in the vicinity of the square or in other parts of Cairo from where protesters were taking supplies to the square. One protester told Human Rights Watch that on January 31, he and a friend bought some blankets to take to protesters who were spending the night in the square. They said they put the blankets in their car and were driving through the Boulak area, not far from Tahrir. An informal neighborhood patrol of civilians set up when the police withdrew from the streets of Cairo on January 28, stopped them at 9.30 p.m. and summoned nearby military police when they saw the blankets. The military police arrested the two men and took them to the military camp in Abbasiyya, in Cairo, they said, where they detained them for two days, along with 20 other detainees, who were not detained in connection with the protest. The two said they were not ill-treated but one of them told Human Rights Watch that he saw military officers beating and using electroshocks on at least 12 other detainees on February 1. All 20 were held in the same room and one detainee told Human Rights Watch that when they spoke to each other, they found that the military had not given any of them an official reason for their detention and beyond some initial questioning, did not formally charge them. In another case, four protesters were arrested apparently because they appeared to be foreign or accompanying a foreigner. On February 4, three Egyptian young men accompanied by a young European woman were walking from Tahrir Square to their home in nearby Garden City, one of them told Human Rights Watch. A neighborhood patrol stopped them, he said, asked for their IDs, refused to believe that they lived in the area, and voiced suspicion of the foreigner in the group. The patrol handed the group over to the military, he said, who detained the four in a room near a military checkpoint on Kasr Aini Street for 12 hours. The military blindfolded them and made them sit on the floor, he said. Another one of the group told Human Rights Watch that there were at least 10 other people detained in the same room and that he saw a military officer kick and hit several of them, although the four were not beaten themselves. The military officers told them that the group had broken the curfew, although they initially did not give this as a reason for their detention. Torture and Ill-treatment Human Rights Watch and the FDP have documented five cases in which persons say that military police tortured them in detention. One protester and civil society activist told Human Rights Watch that he was walking to Tahrir Square along Talaat Harb Street at 3:30 p.m. on February 4 when he encountered a gang of pro-Mubarak young men who took him to a police station off Maa'rouf Street, in downtown Cairo. There, he said, the police beat and interrogated him for around an hour about his political affiliations, why he was protesting and who had recruited him. Uniformed and plainclothes military officers then walked him over to a military post next to the Ramses Hilton for further interrogation before releasing him, he said. When he went back out on to the street another military officer stopped him, checked his bag, and found some notes and activist documents, he told Human Rights Watch. The protester told the soldiers that he had just been interrogated and released, but they surrounded him, pushing and kicking him, he said, and then took him to a building near the Ramses Hilton. He said that they tied his hands behind his back, slapped him, beat him with sticks and rifle butts, kicked him, and threatened to torture him, accusing him of wasting the time of the military with “useless protest tactics” that were “destroying the country.” The soldiers interrogated him yet again about his political affiliations, demanding to know which country was “sponsoring” him and the other protesters. At this point a higher-ranking army officer said they would take him to a hospital, he said, and then two soldiers put him in an ambulance with his hands tied behind his back, continued to slap him and drove him to the Egyptian Museum grounds. He said that a different officer there ordered him to lie on his stomach and kicked him, along with two other soldiers. They threatened to torture him with electro-shocks and by sticking bottles up his anus as they continued to interrogate him. He said there were five others detained with him – an American journalist, an Egyptian photographer, and three Sudanese nationals. He told Human Rights Watch that the interrogation had lasted for around two hours, focusing on leaflets and documents he had collected in Tahrir Square. The military finally released him later in the evening, and called friends to pick him up and take him to a hospital. HRW
