The Egyptian authorities on Thursday detained nine people, including seven women, according to sources close to the banned Muslim Brotherhood group.
Several Brotherhood sources told Anadolu Agency that the nine had been detained from their homes in Cairo and Giza in the early hours of Thursday.
Their whereabouts remain unknown until now, the sources said.
According to the same sources, Aisha, the daughter of jailed Brotherhood deputy leader Khairat al-Shater, was arrested alongside her husband, lawyer, and rights activist Mohamed Abu Hurayrah.
Bahaa Ouda, the brother of jailed Brotherhood member (and former supply minister) Bassem Ouda, was also detained, the sources added, speaking anonymously due to concerns for their safety.
Hoda Abdel-Moneim, a prominent female opposition figure and former member of Egypt’s state-run Human Rights Council, was also reportedly among those rounded up.
The Egyptian authorities, for their part, have yet to comment on the reported rash of detentions.
What happened today in Egypt is an example of hundreds of reported cases of torture and disappearance in Egypt under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government.
In 2013, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, was ousted and imprisoned in a bloody military coup.
Since then, the Egyptian authorities have waged a relentless crackdown on dissent, killing hundreds of political opponents and throwing thousands more behind bars.
Enforced disappearances, mistreatment in prisons, widespread torture, and probable extrajudicial killings notably increased after March 2015, when al-Sisi appointed former Interior Minister Magdy Abd al-Ghaffar.
According to the Human Rights Watch, “Instead of protecting its citizens from torture and forced disappearances, the Egyptian government prefers to criticize and attack groups calling for investigations.”
HRW has also documented the systematic use of torture by the Egyptian police and National Security officers to force detainees to confess or divulge information, or as punishment. Only a handful of the hundreds of torture cases since 2013 have resulted in prosecutions, and few of those ended with convictions.
