Egyptians authorities executed 3 political prisoners today.
Ahmed Elhendawy. Almoataz Alattar. Abdelhamid Metwally.
Their families were supposed to visit them in prison today but the prison authorities told them they won’t see them because they are dead.
Egyptian civil and military courts have sentenced more than 1,400 people to death since Sisi became president in 2014.
According to Ahmed Attar, an Egyptian rights defender based in London, families of three men were informed today by a morgue in Alexandria that they had been executed by hanging and that their bodies were ready for burial.
The three men were university students Ahmed Maher Hindawi and Almotaz Ghanem, and IT company owner Abdel Hamid Metwalli.
The case, known in Egyptian media as “The son of the judge”, dates back to September 2014, when masked gunmen shot dead Mohamed el-Morelli, the 26-year-old son of the vice president of the Cairo appeals court, Judge Mahmoud el-Morelli, in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura.
Confession under torture
Following the murder, security forces rounded up a number of young men from Mansoura, three of whom were later sentenced to death after confessing – reportedly under torture – that they had committed the crime.
Ghanem, who was arrested on 11 October 2014 and forcibly disappeared for 20 days, wrote in a leaked letter that he was subjected to torture by beating and electrocution after he denied committing the crime. According to the letter, he was forced to confess that he took part in the murder and to name two other culprits he did not know.
The sentences, according to Amnesty International, followed “grossly unfair trials” that relied on confessions extracted under torture. Many of those sentenced to death have been either members of the Muslim Brotherhood or critics of the Sisi government.
