The Guardian newspaper said it had obtained a video showing Egyptian police torturing detainees in a police station in the Egyptian capital Cairo, which indicates – according to human rights groups – the extent of violence practiced by police officers against civilians with almost complete impunity.
And the British newspaper reported, in a report by its former correspondent in Cairo, Ruth Michaelson, that the video – which one of the detainees secretly filmed through the door of a cell – appears to show two inmates hanging in stressful positions.
She added that the two inmates were naked from the waist and above, and were hanging from a metal clip from their arms tied behind their backs.
The reporter quoted one of the detainees as saying, “Look how they torture us and our colleagues. They came to us and told us that we were the ones who followed.” Addressing President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, he continued, “Mr. President, we want to ask: Why are the police doing this to us in the First Peace Police Department?”
The video is one of two tapes believed to have been recorded last November from inside a police station in Hay al-Salam, north of Cairo.
In the second tape – which the Guardian did not broadcast in order to protect detainees, it says – inmates of an overcrowded cell line up to show the injuries sustained by police officers and interrogators, including head wounds and bruises to the chest and back.
visual guide
Human rights groups described the two tapes as “visual evidence” of widespread abuse they have documented over the past decade in police stations and detention centers across Egypt.
The newspaper pointed out that the detainees, who appear in the video, revealed the names of several police officers that were mentioned in news reports as working in the Peace Police Department.
The two videos appeared nearly 12 years after the killing of the young Khaled Said while he was being held in a police station in Alexandria in June 2010, an event that was a turning point that sparked popular anger against the impunity of the security forces and their treatment of Egyptian citizens, and sparked a wave of protests that began On January 25, 2011, it ended the rule of former President Hosni Mubarak, who had spent 30 years in power.
And after 11 years of the popular uprising, testimonies and evidence collected by human rights organizations claim that violations by the security services in Egypt are once again out of control, according to the Guardian report.