The Association to Defend Alexandrian Detainees has named five Homeland Security officers who allegedly tortured detainees in Alexandria's security directorate headquarters. The group said on Tuesday that Homeland Security officers Ramy Samy, Abdel Megid Ahmed, Ahmed Al-Meshad, Magdy Ahmed and Moa'taz Abdel Azim tortured dozens of detainees inside the headquarters in order to force them "to confess they committed crimes they did not commit or to inform them of the people who lead protests in Alexandria." Lawyer Mohamed Alam, who is a member of the group, said that the same information can be found in a report by Alexandria-based Al-Shehab Human Rights Centre. Speaking of the injuries sustained under torture, Alam said, "Ahmed Oqba had a lacerated spleen, Mostafa Al-Nemr had a deep wound in the head, Belal Ahmed was assaulted until he passed out, Al-Sayed Abdel Sami' had a broken nose, Mohamed Ramadan had incision wounds in the back, while Ismail Taha and Islam Hamdy were assaulted daily." The aforementioned, according to the association, "are just a sample of tens who are tortured daily in Alexandria Security Directorate". The group also accused Alexandria's prosecution of not taking action despite seeing evidence of torture on detainees' bodies when prosecutors interrogated them. Ministry of Interior spokesman Hany Abdel Latif said that the NGO should report to the human rights department in the ministry regarding these allegations. The department was not available to comment. Law firm United Group announced on 10 December that they had dealt with 193 torture cases, the offenders of which were mainly policemen, between September 2012 and September 2013, with the firm's main partner and prominent human rights lawyer Negad El-Borai saying that there were no clear estimates of the number of torture incidents in Egypt.
