The last time Nosayba Halawa, an Irish-Egyptian citizen, saw her 17-year-old brother, Ibrihim, was on a pixellated live stream of the military siege on a central Cairo mosque on Saturday 16 August.
“He was calling for help and for medicine. Imagine seeing your little brother under fire, begging to go home,” says Nosayba, 32, who was watching with the rest of the family from her home town of Dublin. She describes hearing a crackle of gunfire and screams, and the picture going black.
Dozens of supporters of the ousted president, Mohammed Morsi, barricaded themselves into a back room of al-Fateh Mosque after a Friday protest on Ramses Square turned into a gun battle. Nosayba’s four siblings – Ibrihim, Fatima, 23, Omaima, 21, and Soumaia, 27 – had gone into the centre of town to photograph the rallies while they were on holiday in Cairo. When security forces opened fire, the panicked siblings followed the advice their father had given them over the phone, to seek refuge at the nearby mosque.
The army and police proceeded to close off all the exits to the building by that evening, leaving the four stuck inside among protesters, the injured and the dead during a 24-hour stand-off that culminated in a shootout between a gunman in the minaret and soldiers on the ground. Fatima managed to make one last phone call to tell the family back in Ireland they had been arrested.
I spoke to Fatima on the phone moments before their arrest. “I’ve lost count of the times they have attacked us. They are firing tear gas and bullets in this room and we can’t breathe,” she said, the sound of intense gunfire ringing in the background. “We have injured people in here. I had to sleep next to a dead body.”
The family found out, from protesters who were arrested and later released, that Ibrihim and his sisters had been taken to Cairo’s notorious Tora Prison. The authorities forbade their mother, Amina Mostafa – who flew to Egypt with another daughter, Khadija – from seeing her children. The Irish consulate in Cairo was able to send a representative to Tora on 20 August and he was given brief access to Ibrihim and the three sisters. The diplomat noted that Ibrihim had a gunshot wound to his hand which has not been treated.
“I wasn’t even allowed to take in a toothbrush,” says their mother, who also attempted to take them food and clothes, as well as medicine for her anaemic daughter Soumaia.
The family now does not know where the four siblings are being held. “On Wednesday Soumaia phoned us for one second to say they have been moved to a place called Moascar Salem [a prison camp in Ismailia],” Khadija says. “She didn’t mention Ibrihim. We presume they are in the same place, but we don’t know.”
Under Egyptian law, Ibrihim, who is a minor, should be held in a juvenile detention centre, not among adults in Tora or Moascar Salem. He should also be seen by a specialist child prosecutor and his case should be dealt with in a specialist court for children.
Instead, Ibrihim and his three sisters are being held in an adult prison and facing 15 charges, including joining a terrorist organisation and burning down the Arab Contractors building near Ramses Square. They have not been allowed to see lawyers.
“They have never even lived in Egypt, so how can they possibly know what this building is or what these terrorist organisations are?” Amina asks.
Ibrihim is among 90 children who have been detained since the forced dispersal of two pro-Morsi sit-ins on 14 August. The youngest, according to the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), is just 12 years old. Ahmed Gomaa, a lawyer from the Egyptian Coalition on Children’s Rights, says the children are being charged with a range of serious offences, such as murder and possession of weapons.
The poor treatment of child detainees is not a new phenomenon in Egypt: it persisted under the presidency of Morsi, who was elected in June 2012. Ghada Shahbander of EOHR explains that when her organisation campaigned on the issue before Morsi’s overthrow, they were ignored.
“The Morsi administration disregarded us completely because then it was about their opposition [being arrested],” she says. “Their followers are now bearing the brunt and paying the price for this disregard.”
Meanwhile the Halawa family is still desperately trying to find the children after they were reportedly moved from Tora, but all of the detention centres have denied holding them.
“We heard they may be in Alexandria. We don’t know if they are even still together,” Khadija says. “But we are sure they are still in danger.”
Content from our partners
Give a gift subscription to the New Statesman this Christmas from just £49
Related
