CAIRO - Until now, no one has been able to unravel the mystery behind the sudden disappearance of Reda Hilal, an Egyptian journalist, who was last seen walking in a Cairo street some eight years ago. Hilal, who worked for the semi-official newspaper Al-Ahram, was reported missing on August 11, 2003, and since that date no one has known for certain whether he is dead, or still alive, his neighbours and colleagues have said. Despite extensive investigation into this case, the police can neither solve it nor find Hilal, who according to his family members and colleagues vanished into thin air. Many friends have suggested that Hilal could have disappeared because of personal reasons, or political motives. Hilal was an outspoken critic of the then ruling Mubarak regime, which was ousted on February 11 after a series of nationwide protests, and the Islamic movement. He was a strong supporter of the US invasion of Iraq. He was last seen by his colleagues leaving Al-Ahram office building in Cairo after a long day of work. Ashraf Abul Hassan, the doorkeeper of Hilal's building, remembers seeing the missing journalist entering his flat. "Hilal asked me to buy him some soft drinks and ordered a meal from a nearby restaurant. But when the delivery man and I returned with his orders, we saw that there was a lock on Hilal's apartment's door," Ashraf recalls. On the following day, he continued, Hilal's brother opened the flat to find everything intact. "But, all the windows were open and Hilal was not there. And since then, he has never been seen again," the doorman stated. His family members believe that Hilal was kidnapped because of his political views. Some of them have said that Hilal disappeared because he opposed the then president's plans to groom his younger son, Gamal, as the future leader of Egypt. Others claimed that Hilal was kidnapped or murdered by extremist Islamist groups because of his “secular views”, or because of his stance on the US-led war on Iraq, or his call for closer ties between Egypt and Israel. However, his close friends have claimed that the police had not done enough to find any clues that might unravel Hilal's mysterious disappearance, or at least confirm or deny that he was dead or alive. At the time, the police officers in charge of the case agreed that the missing journalist had not been kidnapped from his house or forced to leave it. "They agreed Hilal left willingly, and even had enough time to place a lock on the front door," Ashraf said. The police also excluded the possibility that Hilal might have voluntarily left the country via any of its air, land or seaports. However, Alaa el-Attar, a journalist and a close friend of the missing man, said that the mysterious disappearance of Hilal is still a confusing issue. "Hilal disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and his name has since faded away, as if he never existed," el-Attar lamented. He added that only a few Egyptian journalists seem to care about Hilal's disappearance, while the police had shelved the whole case, even before the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and the arrest of the former Minister of Interior Habib el-Adli. "The last piece of a significant article about Reda Hilal's disappearance was published in Al-Ahram newspaper in August 2009. The information suggested that he was alive, in a prison in Alexandria, but Egyptian security forces refused to confirm or deny the story at the time,” el-Attar told the local Radio and TV magazine in a recent interview. “Today, the same question still stands: where is he? With successive reports about public security documents being burned or destroyed in several Egyptian governorates, among them Alexandria, one fears that the opportunity to know where Hilal is, or what happened to him, is now fading away. This is a tragic situation," deplored el-Attar. The local press today is preoccupied with leaked security documents, which contain information potentially detrimental to certain Egyptians. This is the season for scandals and the settling of scores, and it seems that many will be affected, rightly or wrongly. This is understandable, especially as we are dealing with the documents of an authoritarian regime that lasted for 30 years, and it appears that Egypt's security apparatus was responsible for the rise and fall of people. Yet there is still great hope that the secret story behind Hilal's disappearance will be revealed, and, of course, more importantly is his release, if he is still alive, say his family and friends. It doesn't matter whether the Egyptian media agrees with what Hilal wrote or not – he was a defender of democracy, and coined the famous phrase "Saddam's orphans", after the fall of the former Iraqi regime, they add. "All I can hope for today is for the Hilal case to be solved, either with his return or by him being declared officially dead, so that his family and friends can rest," argued el-Attar.
