While Egypt’s president has just claimed on CNN
that his country enjoys unprecedented freedom of expression, Reporters
Without Borders (RSF) points out that tomorrow a court will begin
hearing the appeals of six unjustly detained journalists who were given
life sentences in April. RSF calls for their immediate and unconditional
release.
The six journalists were convicted of disseminating
false news, inciting violence and chaos, and being part of an
“operations room” aimed at orchestrating attacks against the government
during demonstrations in Cairo’s Rabaa Adawiya Square in support of
deposed President Mohamed Morsi.
The journalists worked for different media but all covered the demonstrations and all were critical of the government.
“The outcome of these journalists’ appeals will be decisive for the future of media freedom in Egypt,” said Alexandra El Khazen, the head of RSF’s Middle East and Maghreb desk.
“The fact that their appeals are being heard at the
same time as those of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood group is
extremely disturbing. We urge the Egyptian authorities to quash their
convictions and free them because they were arrested just for doing
their job as journalists to report the news.”
The six include two journalists with the Rassd news website – reporter Abdullah Alfakharany, who is one of the site’s founders, and Samhi Mostafa, its executive director. They were arrested in August 2013 along with Mohammed Al-Adly, a presenter on Amgad TV, a religious TV channel.
Hany Salah Al-Deen, the former news editor of the pro-Muslim Brotherhood TV channel Misr 25 and former editor of the Youm7 news website, was arrested in December 2013 at Cairo airport. The authorities closed Misr 25 after Morsi’s overthrow in July 2013.
Mossab Al Barbary, the head of the pro-Muslim Brotherhood TV channel Ahrar 25 and former Misr 25 manager, was arrested at Beirut airport, where he had gone on a business trip, and was deported to Cairo.
Hassan Al Qabbani, an editor with Rassd and with the newspaper of the Muslim Brotherhood party, Freedom and Justice, was arrested at his home in January 2015.
There are eight other journalists among those whose
appeals will begin being heard tomorrow but RSF had not been able to
establish any link between their arrests and their work as journalists.
Most of the journalists currently imprisoned in Egypt
are directly or indirectly accused of supporting a banned organization,
above all the Muslim Brotherhood, inciting violence and disseminating
false information. The Muslim Brotherhood was declared a “terrorist
organization” in December 2013.
With at least 20 journalists currently detained, Egypt
is the world’s fourth biggest prison for media personnel (after China,
Eritrea and Iran) and is ranked 158th out of 180 countries in RSF’s press freedom index.
In Insurgent Fight, Border Families Left to Fend for Themselves
Summary
“I myself
used to make food and tea for the soldiers and they came and sat in the
shade of our olive tree when the sun beat down on them … My mother told
me: ‘The tree is your responsibility. I fed you from it and raised you
on it. Even in times of war, we lived from its oil when nobody could
find food.’ Now there’s nothing I can do but hold the tree and kiss it
and say, ‘Forgive me, mom, what can I do.’” – Hajja Zaynab
Between July 2013 and August 2015, Egyptian authorities demolished at least 3,255
residential, commercial, administrative, and community buildings in the
Sinai Peninsula along the border with the Gaza Strip, forcibly evicting
thousands of people. Extended families who had lived side by side for
decades found themselves dispersed, forced to abandon the multi-story
houses they had built next to their relatives and passed down through
generations.
Some families became homeless and lived in tents or sheds
on open land or in informal settlements. The Egyptian authorities razed
around 685 hectares of cultivated farmland, depriving families of food
and livelihood and stripping most of the border of its traditional
olive, date and citrus groves. The evictions scattered families among
the Sinai’s towns and villages and in some cases as far as Cairo and the
Nile Delta.
The Egyptian government has indicated that these evictions
could continue.
The Egyptian army began demolishing buildings along the border
in July 2013 as part of a reinvigorated but long-considered plan to
establish a “buffer zone” with the Gaza Strip. These demolitions rapidly
accelerated after October 24, 2014, when the Sinai-based armed group
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, or Supporters of Jerusalem, carried out an
unprecedented attack on an army checkpoint in North Sinai governorate,
reportedly killing 28 soldiers.
The following month, Ansar Beit
al-Maqdis pledged allegiance to the extremist group Islamic State, also
known as ISIS, and changed its name to Sinai Province.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who had taken office in June
2014 after orchestrating the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsy
the year before, said in a speech on national television the day after
the attack that Egypt was fighting a war “for its existence.” He
declared a three-month state of emergency in most of North Sinai and
convened the National Defense Council and Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces, which agreed on a plan to establish a “secure zone” along the
Gaza border.
Five days after the attack, Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb
issued a decree ordering the “isolation” and “evacuation” of 79 square
kilometers stretching along the entire Gaza border and extending between
five and seven kilometers into the Sinai. The buffer zone encompassed
all of Rafah, a town of some 78,000 people that lies directly on the
border, as well as significant agricultural land around the town.
Egyptian authorities justified the buffer zone as a way to
defeat the insurgency by shutting down the smuggling tunnels that they
said allowed fighters and weapons to pass from Gaza to the Sinai. Since
2007, Gaza, which is governed by the Islamist Palestinian movement
Hamas, has been under a strict Israeli blockade. For most of this
period, Egypt has cooperated in the blockade by severely restricting the
flow of people and goods between Gaza and the Sinai. Tunnels have
served as a key supply line between the two sides.
Egyptian officials described the buffer zone as a way to clear
the border area for military operations and eliminate this supply line. A
statement on the Defense Ministry’s website described the zone as a way
to “finally eliminate the problem” of tunnels, “one of the main
sources” for armed groups to enter Sinai and supply insurgents with
“arms and ammunition.”
Maj. Gen. Abd al-Fattah Harhour, the governor of
North Sinai, said the decree was intended “to defend Egypt from
terrorism.” One advisor to the military’s Commanders and Staff College
told a newspaper that the buffer zone would have two benefits: putting
the zone under military court jurisdiction and clearing it of civilians,
so that it would “be regarded as an open theater.”
[Satellite images show
final building demolition in central Rafah between October 5, 2014 and
August 12, 2015. Center Coordinates : Geo-34°14'13.106"E
31°17'15.48"N ; MGRS-36RXV1773762140. Pléiades-1
Though the renewed threat of violence from insurgent groups in
2014 provided a useful pretext, the Egyptian government had for years
taken steps to prepare a buffer zone. In response to pressure from
Israel and the United States to more effectively seal the border, former
President Hosni Mubarak had ordered a 150-meter-wide strip of land
cleared in 2007, but protests forced the government to abandon the plan
before it began.
Two years later, Mubarak’s government tried and failed
to build an 18-meter-deep steel wall under the ground along the border.
According to Sinai activists, the government rekindled the idea
of a buffer zone in 2012, under President Morsy, when al-Sisi—then
defense minister—banned private property ownership on land within five
kilometers of Gaza. Al-Sisi declared the land a “strategic area of
military importance,” a designation that, under Egyptian law, made it
easier for the military to seize property.
The October 2014 buffer
zone decree issued by Prime Minister Mehleb, which contained a map,
delineated an eviction area that matched al-Sisi’s decree from two years
prior.
In the wake of the decree, Egyptian officials gave
contradictory statements about the scope of the coming evictions. Though
newspapers had published the decree and 79-square-kilometer map in its
entirety, Governor Harhour claimed the day before the decree that the
military would only clear an area 500 meters from the border.
On
November 17, 2014, the military declared that the buffer zone would be
expanded to one kilometer. In January 2015, Harhour told a reporter that
the buffer zone would likely mean evicting the entire town of Rafah. In
August, Harhour confirmed that a further expansion of the buffer zone,
to 1.5 kilometers, would encompass about 1,200 more homes.
Furthermore, a Human Rights Watch analysis of satellite imagery
showed that the Egyptian authorities actually began large-scale home
demolitions on the border more than a year before the October 2014
buffer zone decree was issued and that these demolitions occurred far
outside the initial 500-meter strip described in public by officials.
These satellite images showed that home demolitions began after the
military, led by al-Sisi, ousted Morsy on July 3, 2013.
The authorities destroyed at least 540 buildings along the
border in the 16 months between Morsy’s ouster and the October 2014
decree, including 50 that lay more than a kilometer from the border,
Human Rights Watch found. Yet on the day of the decree, Governor Harhour
claimed that only 122 homes had been destroyed. After the decree, the
Egyptian military demolished at least 2,715 more buildings.
About 3,200
families have lost their homes, according to the government.
Human Rights Watch spoke with journalists and activists in the Sinai and 11 families evicted from the buffer zone and analyzed a detailed time series of over 50 commercial
satellite images recorded over Rafah between March 11, 2013 and August
15, 2015. Human Rights Watch determined that the large-scale destruction
of at least 3,255 buildings in Rafah to counter the threat of smuggling
tunnels was likely disproportionate and did not meet Egypt’s
obligations under international human rights law or the laws of war.
Since August 14, 2013, the day Egyptian security forces
violently dispersed a mass sit-in protesting Morsy’s removal, killing
more than 817 people in one day, Egypt has faced an increasingly
dangerous insurgency mounted by an array of groups throughout the
country but particularly intense in North Sinai.
Little is known about the Sinai insurgents. In November 2014, Western officials told the New York Times
that they estimated that the main insurgent group, Sinai Province—then
still known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis—might boast as little as a few
hundred fighters or as many as “a few thousand.” The Sinai Province
group rarely provides any details about itself. The group has never
named a leader nor described its organization, and it has publicly
identified fewer than two dozen fighters by name.
Though the group launched sporadic raids and rocket attacks
against Israel in the years preceding Morsy’s removal and the mass
killing of his supporters, by September 2013, it had turned its
attention toward al-Sisi’s government and the military, promising
“revenge for Muslims against whoever helped in killing or assaulting
them.” The following December, it declared the Egyptian armed forces
“unbelievers” who “fight against all who call for the application of
Islamic law.”
Since 2013, the insurgents have proven capable of sustaining an
increasingly sophisticated campaign against Egyptian military and
security forces in North Sinai while also carrying out attacks on
security forces and buildings in Cairo, the Western Desert region and
elsewhere.
In addition to the October 2014 attack, the group launched
large, coordinated assaults on government positions in North Sinai in
January 2015 and July 2015, likely killing more than 100 Egyptian
soldiers in total, according to local media outlets. The July 1, 2015,
attack on army and police positions in the town of Sheikh Zuweid in
North Sinai may have been the largest insurgent attack in Egypt’s modern
history and marked the first time that insurgents in Sinai succeeded in
temporarily seizing populated territory.
Only attacks by Egyptian air
force F-16 fighter jets managed to drive the fighters out of Sheikh
Zuweid after 12 hours of combat. The Sinai Province group has also used
sophisticated guided missiles to destroy tanks, shoot down at least one
Egyptian military helicopter and severely damage at least one Egyptian
navy vessel.
More than 3,600 people, including civilians, security forces
and alleged insurgents, have reportedly died in North Sinai between July
2013 and July 2015, according to media reports and government
statements aggregated by the Washington, DC-based Tahrir Institute for
Middle East Policy. Roughly 2,650 people, about 73 percent of those who
died, have reportedly been killed since the first major attack in
October 2014.
This ongoing fighting, primarily between the Egyptian military and the
Sinai Province group, may amount to a non-international armed conflict,
meaning that the conduct of both sides would be subject to international
humanitarian law, also called the laws of war.
Under the laws of war, the Egyptian armed forces may close
tunnels that are being used to send arms or materiel to the armed groups
it is fighting, respond to attacks on its forces, and take preventive
measures to avoid further attacks. But such measures are strictly
regulated by the provisions of international humanitarian law, which
require all parties to distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Egypt’s military can attack or destroy civilian buildings only when they
become military objectives and are making an “effective contribution”
to military action. The laws of war also prohibit the forced
displacement of civilians “unless the security of the civilians involved
or imperative military reasons so demand.”
Human Rights Watch found that the large-scale destruction of
homes and other buildings in Rafah did not meet the requirement under
the laws of war that Egypt’s army target only specific military
objectives. The demolitions made no distinction between tunnels and
civilian homes, and less-destructive methods could have effectively
restricted, and in fact had reportedly restricted, tunnel smuggling.
For
example, in July 2013, when the military first began home demolitions
on the Gaza border, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs in Occupied Palestinian Territory estimated that
existing Egyptian efforts to close the tunnels through demolition or
flooding had been successful, eliminating perhaps all but 10.
Furthermore, Egypt likely possessed the capability to detect
and eliminate specific tunnels without resorting to the arbitrary
destruction of a large buffer zone. In 2008 and 2009, according to media
reports and the US Defense Department, the US Army Corps of Engineers
trained Egyptian troops to use advanced technological equipment that
measures ground fluctuations to indicate tunnel digging. In August 2013,
the US Defense Department awarded the defense company Raytheon a $9.9
million contract to continue research and development in Egypt on its
version of this technology, which is known as a laser radar vibration
sensor.
Though the Sinai-Gaza tunnels may qualify as lawful military
objectives in some cases, Human Rights Watch also found it unclear to
what extent they make an effective contribution to the Sinai Province
group’s military capability or to the overall insurgency.
According to
both media reports and government statements, most of the heavy weapons
in use in the Sinai, including heavy machine guns, shoulder-fired
anti-aircraft missiles, and anti-tank missiles, have likely been
smuggled from Libya and bought, stockpiled and sold within the Sinai.
Israeli and US officials have expressed concern about weapons smuggling
from the Sinai to Gaza, but rarely the reverse. Indeed, the buffer zone
appears to be as important to Israel’s security as Egypt’s.
“When we take security measures in the Sinai, those measures
confirm our sovereignty over the Sinai, which is part and parcel of
Egyptian territory. We will never allow anyone to launch attacks from
our territory against neighbors or against Israel,” al-Sisi said in a
televised November 2014 interview. “The buffer zone should have been
established for years already … We took this decision in consultation
with the local population. Meetings have been organized to compensate
them of course, and to rebuild the city of Rafah to make it more
pleasant to live in.”
Whether or not the fighting in North Sinai has reached the level of a
non-international armed conflict, international human rights law
continues to apply and bind the Egyptian authorities. The demolition
campaign since July 2013 has violated these laws, specifically the right
to housing laid out in United Nations and African conventions to which
Egypt is a party.
This right provides specific protections during
evictions, such as: genuine consultation with those being evicted;
adequate and reasonable notice; information on the eviction and future
use of the land; legal remedies; and legal aid. International law
prohibits "forced evictions," defined as the permanent or temporary
removal of individuals, families or communities against their will from
their homes or land, without access to appropriate forms of legal or
other protection.
[Video shows the active
deployment of dozens of Egyptian government soldiers and at least three
armored personnel carriers (APCs) next to a military base along the
border with Gaza. Excavator is visible in adjacent courtyard demolishing
a wall and small building. Recorded between February 28 – April 12,
2014. Video Location- Geo-34°14'20.186"E 31°17'41.961"N;
MGRS-36RXV1791762959.]
[Two wheeled and tracked
APCs parked with soldiers observing residents remove their belongings on
to pickup truck before demolition. Recorded between October 20 – 31,
2014. Video location: Geo-34°14'28.365"E 31°17'18.796"N; MGRS:
36RXV1814262246.]
Video shows soldiers setting and wiring the demolition charges in building that is later demolished.
[Video of the building
seconds after the detonation of high explosives by government soldiers.
Recorded November 1-4, 2014. Video location: Geo-34°14'46.823"E,
31°16'31.159"N; MGRS-36RXV1864460785.]
Egypt is also obliged to protect the right to property, as set
out in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, to which it is a
party. This includes recognizing individuals’ and groups’ property
rights over homes and land they have traditionally occupied, whether or
not they have written documentation. Evictions should be a last resort
and accompanied with fair compensation.
Residents told Human Rights Watch that the Egyptian army
provided no written warning of the impending evictions and that many
residents heard about the coming demolitions from army patrols,
neighbors or media outlets. These residents, often told to pack up their
lives and leave within 48 hours, were sometimes made to wait for weeks
for the demolition to take place and were forced to live in houses they
had hurriedly emptied, amid mostly abandoned neighborhoods where shops
had closed and government-supplied water and electricity had been shut
off.
The government offered families a small and inadequate one-time
payment of 900 Egyptian pounds (US $118) to cover three months of rent
as they searched for a new home for themselves and their relatives.
The Egyptian government offered compensation to residents for
their homes, but most of the families said that the compensation was not
enough to buy property that would equal their previous standard of
living and that the process was opaque and lacked any mechanism for
objection. Residents were coerced to sign a form that falsely stated
they had voluntarily given their property to the state and pledged to
not build again within the buffer zone.
Rafah city council employees
would not give families their compensation checks if they did not sign
the form. The government did not offer any compensation for agricultural
land, even land which families farmed or rented to others, considering
it “empty.”
The government did not provide compensation to anyone who
owned property where a tunnel or tunnel entrance was allegedly found.
The Egyptian government did not appear to have a plan to ensure
that the evictions did not interrupt children’s education. The army
destroyed at least six schools in the buffer zone, and families told
Human Rights Watch that they struggled to place their children in new
schools outside the buffer zone. One family said that they had not been
able to find a new school; the others said that they had placed their
children in schools with the help of family friends in the government.
The Rafah evictions have taken place amid an ongoing
counterinsurgency campaign by the Egyptian government involving
widespread arrests and attacks on alleged insurgent positions in the
area. Since the October 2014 insurgent attack on the army checkpoint,
much of North Sinai has been under a curfew and state of emergency.
One
resident told Human Rights Watch that the military used dogs to
intimidate homeowners during the eviction process, and in one early 2014
case their use was captured on video footage posted to YouTube. Another
video provided to Human Rights Watch, filmed in the first week of
November 2014, showed a US-made Egyptian army M60 main battle tank
firing at a building on the border, apparently in order to demolish it.
In an October 10, 2014, incident widely circulated after also being
posted to YouTube, and which Human Rights Watch verified, army soldiers
near the Gura checkpoint southwest of Rafah severely beat two Sinai men,
one of them apparently already injured and wearing blood-stained
clothes, before pushing them into an unmarked room where at least three
other people were being held. Civilians have also been intimidated and
attacked by insurgents. The Sinai Province group has destroyed the
property of alleged government collaborators and killed and on occasion
beheaded others.
Few voices in Egypt criticized the evictions, and many Egyptian
media outlets called for the armed forces to take harsh measures in
North Sinai. After the October 2014 attack, current and former Egyptian
security officials appeared on private television news shows saying that
“there is no need for [an] understanding” with North Sinai residents
and that “these so-called innocent residents are the ones harboring and
protecting terrorists.”
The National Council for Human Rights, in its
annual report, said that the evictions were legal and the compensation
fair. The government in almost all cases denied journalists and human
rights groups access to North Sinai. The head of news at Egypt’s state
broadcasting authority said the authority’s journalists could not
broadcast events in the Sinai without instructions and permission from
the armed forces.
The evictions have received virtually no international scrutiny
or condemnation. The United States reacted to them with approval. On
October 30, 2014, a State Department spokesperson said, referring to the
Egyptian government, “we understand the threat that they are facing
from the Sinai” and that “Egypt has the right to take steps to maintain
their own security.”
Neither Egypt’s Gulf allies nor sympathetic nations
in the European Union, including Germany, France and the United
Kingdom, have condemned the evictions.
Human Rights Watch calls on the Egyptian government to halt its
forced evictions along the Gaza border and study the possibility of
destroying tunnels using less destructive means. Human Rights Watch
calls on the United States, which supplies much of the military
equipment used by Egypt, to ensure that it can undertake robust
human rights vetting for the use of all US military assistance and to
not supply Egypt with military aid that risks being used in the
commission of serious human rights abuses.
Human Rights Watch
calls on the United Nations special rapporteur on housing to request an
urgent visit to Egypt and on the United Nations Human Rights Council to
pass a joint resolution expressing concern about the human rights
situation in Egypt.
Mexico is demanding compensation for the families of the tourists who were killed in an accidental military airstrike
in Egypt’s Western Desert last Sunday, the Agence France-Presse (AFP)
reported, as Egyptian officials wage a battle against unflattering media
coverage of the tragedy.
The Mexican foreign affairs ministry
submitted the demand in writing to Yassir Sharban, Egypt’s ambassador to
Mexico, on Thursday. That night in Cairo, Mexican Foreign Affairs
Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu accompanied survivors from the attack and
relatives of the victims on a flight back home.
The airstrike
killed eight Mexican tourists and four Egyptians who were in a convoy of
four jeeps reportedly en route back to their hotel. The bombardment
injured 10 others. Egyptian authorities assert that the convoy was in a
restricted zone where the Armed Forces were waging a security operation
against alleged terrorists.
But members of the General Tourist Guides Syndicate said
that the convoy had the necessary security permits for the trip, had
submitted an itinerary to the police and was accompanied by a police
escort.
"The Mexican government demands the necessary guarantees
so that the victims of the tragic and regrettable attack perpetrated on
September 13, all of them innocent civilians and their families, receive
full reparations for the damage, including compensation," the statement
said.
Mexican officials also reiterated their demands for an
exhaustive investigation into the attack to bring those responsible for
committing the lethal error to justice.
In a joint press conference on Wednesday, foreign ministers from both countries emphasized their efforts to expedite investigations into the tragedy.
The
survivors and relatives of the victims are expected to arrive home on
Friday. Unnamed security sources told the privately owned newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm
that Ruiz Massieu accompanied them to the Cairo International Airport
on Thursday night. They arrived in six ambulances guarded by a police
convoy. A medical team from the Nasser Institute and the Ambulance
Authority was also present to aid the wounded.
Mexican news
outlets have begun publishing the survivors’ accounts of the deadly
attack.
Susana Calderon was in the convoy and survived with serious
injuries, but her husband of 20 years died in the assault. They were on
the “trip of a lifetime” and had planned to visit France, Belgium,
Germany, Austria and Italy after their sojourn in Egypt.
Calderon said the group had stopped to eat in the desert and the tour operators were preparing lunch when the assault began.
“We were bombed five times from the air,” she said. “It lasted at least three hours.”
A
driver, the son of one of the trip’s organizers and the police escort
were all killed in the first hour, she said. After the first round of
bombs, one of the convoy drivers called someone — Calderon believes he
was calling for help, and that’s why the ambulances arrived shortly
thereafter.
“I saw my husband when they were putting me on the
stretcher to take me to the hospital,” Calderon continued. “I heard him
telling me he loved me. I told him I loved him too. That’s the last I
knew about him. Every day I asked the nurses, and they told me he was
here in the hospital. They didn’t want to tell me” that he had died.
While the Mexican government and press have circulated detailed accounts of the attack, Egyptian authorities continue to remain tight-lipped, while condemning media coverage that's inconsistent with official accounts.
On
Wednesday, the prosecutor general issued a media gag on coverage of
investigations. Then late Thursday night, the Foreign Affairs Ministry published an open letter to the New York Times editorial board lambasting what it called “disingenuous and misleading” coverage of the attack.
Such
biased, partial reporting has become the norm in that newspaper, the
letter alleged. “Responsible and ethical reporting requires the media to
report facts, not pass judgment and baseless accusations in the absence
of any evidence,” the ministry argued.
The ministry accused the
New York Times editors of taking official statements out of context and
casting doubt on official investigations into the incident. The
newspaper’s coverage comes across as a deliberate attempt to “provoke
the people of Mexico and incite negative sentiments," the statement
continued.
“Given the impact the media has on public opinion, it
is the duty of the New York Times and its editorial board to choose
professionalism over sensationalism and integrity over partiality,”
ministry spokesperson Ahmed Abu Zeid wrote. “Unfortunately, this has not
been the case in this particular incident and in many others before
it.”
Workers were seen demolishing a part
of the wall surrounding the American University in Cairo on Thursday.
"In the framework of beautifying Tahrir Sqaure, the Egyptian
government asked the American University in Cairo to either develop or
remove its Science building along with its walls on Mohamed Mahmoud
street," Rehab Saad, Director of Media Relations at the American
University of Cairo, told Aswat Masriya in a phone interview.
"The university decided to demolish parts of the walls and replace them by an iron gate," she added.
Mohamed Mahmoud street, which is a side street from Egypt's famed
Tahrir Square, is known for the graffiti on its walls, which includes
symbols of the January uprising , the battles on the street, and murals
inspired by Egypt's heritage.
*Photos by Ahmed Hamed - courtesy of Aswat Masriya
The gag order applies to audio, video, print and online media
Wednesday 16 Sep 2015
Egypt's prosecution has imposed a gagging order on the investigation
into the mistaken killing on Sunday of Mexican tourists on a safari trip
in Egypt, Aswat Masriya reported on Wednesday afternoon.
Zakaria Osman, the assistant prosecutor-general, told reporters the gag
order applies to audio, video, and print media, as well as internet
sites.
The prosecution's statements and updates about the case will be excluded from the order, he added.
Eight Mexicans were killed according to Mexican officials among 12
people who lost their lives and 10 who were wounded on Sunday after
security forces fired on the group of tourists mistakenly.
The interior ministry has stated that the forces had been chasing militants in the Western Desert.
Egypt's prosecution has regularly issued gag orders on politically
sensitive investigations such as the inquest into the murder of former
prosecutor-general Hisham Barakat and investigations concerning the
militant outlawed Islamist group Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis.
Eight Mexicans among 12 dead in mistaken attack in Western Desert - ‘We were bombed some five times, always from the air’
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Egyptian forces bombed a convoy of Mexican tourists about five times
over a period of three hours, even after local security forces on the
ground had stopped them twice and cleared their passage, according to
one of six Mexican survivors of the deadly attack.
Susana Calderón spoke to the Mexican newspaper El Universal in a
Cairo hospital before she and the other injured tourists were due to
head home on Thursday. Her husband Luis was among eight Mexicans killed in the incident that claimed 12 lives.
“We were bombed some five times, always from the air,” she said.
Calderón’s arm was marked with wounds and her right leg was paralysed,
though doctors believe she will recover movement, the newspaper
reported.
Six Mexican tourists wounded in an Egyptian airstrike that mistakenly
killed eight of their compatriots were to head home on Thursday, a
Mexican foreign ministry spokesman said.
Their wider group of 22 people had parked on Sunday for a barbecue
near the Bahariya oasis, a tourist site in the western desert, when army
aircraft began shelling them believing they were militants, security
sources and survivors have said.
Egypt said the tourists had entered a restricted area
in the Western Desert and were “mistakenly” killed as security forces
chased jihadists who had abducted and beheaded an Egyptian.
Hassan al-Nahla, the head of Egypt’s tour guides union, said the
group had received all the required permits and set off with a police
escort from Cairo to the Bahariya oasis, roughly 350km (220 miles) away.
“I saw my husband when they put me on a stretcher to take me to
hospital,” said Calderón. “I saw he was very badly wounded. He had a
broken arm, like me. He had many wounds on his back, his waist, his
whole spine, his legs.”
“I heard him tell me he loved me. I told him I loved him, too. And
then I heard nothing more of him,” she said, adding that she was told
days later that he had died.
The incident has proven embarrassing for Egypt, which relies heavily on tourism revenues.
Mexico’s foreign minister, Claudia Ruiz Massieu, met the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, on Wednesday.
In a press conference with Ruiz Massieu on Wednesday, her Egyptian
counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, promised a “transparent” investigation.
But the state prosecutor, whose office handles investigations, has
placed a gag order on reporting details of the inquiry, the official
MENA news agency reported.
Ruiz Massieu will accompany the survivors and the victims’ remains home to Mexico.
The five women and a man where wheeled out of the hospital on stretchers and lifted into ambulances, an AFP photographer said.
“I’m very grateful to the Egyptian people and the Mexican people for
all their attentiveness,” said one, Marisela Rangel Dávalos, as she was
being placed into an ambulance.
The Western Desert is popular with tour groups, but is also a
militant hideout, with western embassies warning against non-essential
travel there.
Last month, Egypt’s branch of the Islamic State group, which calls
itself Sinai Province, beheaded a Croatian oil worker, who was abducted
near Cairo, at the edge of the Western Desert.
IS’s affiliate in the Sinai peninsula has killed hundreds of soldiers
since 2013, when the army ousted the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi,
and launched a bloody crackdown on his supporters.
Security forces attempted to prevent a planned mass demonstration in an authorized area by civil service workers on Saturday.
Protesters
called for the civil service law, issued in March by presidential
decree, to be amended or annulled, until a parliament is formed to draft
a new law.
Civil service workers claim current legislation
negatively affects their incomes, and gives administrators sweeping
powers. They say the government did not engage in any genuine
consultation with public sector workers, civil servants or their unions
in the process of drafting the decree.
The park is one of two designated areas
in Cairo where protests can take place without prior police
authorization, according to a decree by the governor of Cairo, although
organizers are required to give prior notification of any action. The
other is Car's Market in Nasr City.
Civil servants, particularly
Tax Authority employees, have organized previous demonstrations against
the civil service law. They gathered outside the Cabinet headquarters on
July 27, at the Journalists Syndicate on August 10, and outside the Tax Authority headquarters on September 6. A similar protest planned for August 17 was denied authorization.
Civil
servants and public sector employees were also denied access to Tahrir
Square just one month after security forces secured celebrations to mark
the inauguration of the new Suez Canal passageway. They were similarly
denied permission to protest outside the Cabinet and Journalists
Syndicate. The only location that was agreed upon for Saturday's
demonstration was the walled garden, Fustat Park.
Protest
organizer Wael Tawfiq told Mada Masr, "These designated protest sites
are difficult to access, isolated from the streets and blocked-off from
public view. It is an extension of the ban on street protests, and an
attempt to isolate all protests from the public."
As protesters
gathered outside Fustat Park in Cairo, police sealed off the main
entrance and claimed maintenance works were taking place, although no
such work was evident, according to Mada Masr reporters present.
The
media spokesperson for Fustat Park, Randa al-Rawwas, confirmed that no
renovations or maintenance work were being undertaken in the park.
She
added that only 20 feddans (approx. 20 acres) were allocated for
Saturday's protest, not the whole park. Demonstrators were reportedly
told they would have to disperse by 4 pm, as the park closes at this
time.
Rawwas said that regime supporters would not be permitted entry to the park during the protest, to avoid potential clashes.
The
Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS) issued a statement
saying that several buses transporting civil servants were stopped as
they approached the park, with many participants from provinces outside
Cairo returning home after being denied access.
An independent
union organizer, employed by the Public Transport Authority, reported
that buses transporting civil servants to Cairo were being stopped at
checkpoints and some were turned back, along with supplies of water for
protesters in the park.
However, after an hour of negotiation with
police forces, around 500 protesters were permitted to enter the park
through the back entrance, as police largely withdrew from the scene and
plain-clothed regime supporters gathered at the rear entrance,
prompting fears of an attack.
Tawfiq told Mada Masr that, although
regime supporters didn't enter the park, police did not prevent them
from congregating outside, and some of them had weapons.
Protesters
carried placards calling for the purging of the Tax Authority and
bearing the name of the organizing committee "Tadamon" (Solidarity).
They chanted "illegitimate" against the civil service law.
Tawfiq told Mada
Masr, "Police banned protesters from accessing the park at several
points. The regime also engaged in misinformation campaigns and used the
threat of attack from locals to deter future protests."
MISINFORMATION AND THREATS AHEAD OF SATURDAY'S PROTEST
In
the lead up to Saturday's protest, organizers and demonstrators
reported being subjected to a series of threats and misinformation from
television personalities, as well as condemnation by the
state-controlled trade union. The demonstration was largely planned by
members of independent trade unions.
Media reports were also circulated claiming the protest had been cancelled.
Protest
organizer Fatma Fouad says there were attempts to hijack the protest in
a similar way to during the Battle of the Camel, which took place in
Tahrir Square on February 2, 2011.
Two days ago, pro-government television anchor Ahmed Moussa threatened the civil servants planning to protest: “You will pay the price dearly if you join.”
He
attempted to link the protest to the banned Muslim Brotherhood group,
who he described as "terrorists," during his show on the privately owned
Sada al-Balad channel.
“There are orders from the terrorist
Brotherhood that there must be bloodshed on this day, it doesn’t matter
whose blood is shed, that of Brotherhood members, employees. I warn the
populace that they have tents and intend on organizing a protest camp,”
Moussa claimed, adding, “They should be arrested, prosecuted and put on
trial, even referred to military trials.”
However, protest organizers denied that a sit-in was planned, insisting it was always intended as a one-day event.
Moussa
warned participants, who he argued are bent on toppling the state: “You
will be grabbed by the neck. You think you’ll go back home? You won’t
go home.”
He asserted: “It’s an issue of the state versus no state, and I know there is a strong state.”
Organizers
and independent unions behind Saturday’s protest denied that they are
seeking to topple the state or to threaten national security in any way.
The state-controlled trade union federation (ETUF) openly denounced the protest. ETUF President Gebali al-Maraghy claimed
the federation “strongly condemns calls for demonstrations under the
guise of protesting against the civil service law,” referring to the
planned protest as being “suspect,” and attempting to ruin the
government’s accomplishments.
The ETUF countered calls for the protest by calling on all civil servants and public sector employees to work an additional hour on Saturday, following the conclusion of their workday on Saturday.
Prime
Minister Ibrahim Mehleb, whose Cabinet resigned on Saturday ahead of
the planned protest, warned against attempts to strike, or to obstruct
state functions last week. Mehleb claimed such protests aim “to unsettle the political scene.”
Similarly, the Justice Ministry warned
against strike action or absenteeism in light of Saturday’s planned
mass protest. Civil servants employed under the auspices of the ministry
were threatened with disciplinary measures if they did not attend work.
Tawfiq
told Mada Masr: "We were practically prevented from protesting today
due to all these restrictions and police harassment, yet, our message
against this unjust law has been delivered. It is the first nail in the
coffin of the civil service law. This is only the beginning."
He added that further protests are being planned and will be announced in the next few days.
An Egyptian military force of 800 soldiers
reportedly arrived in Yemen late on Tuesday to join the ranks of the
Saudi-led coalition forces fighting the Houthis, Egyptian security
sources told Reuters on Wednesday.
There has been ambiguity surrounding previous local media reports about the ground military intervention in Yemen, as Egyptian government representatives remained tight-lipped amid rumors that 3000 ground troops were recently deployed to Makha, which overlooks the strategic Bab al-Mandab area.
Four
units of between 150 to 200 troops, along with tanks and transport
vehicles arrived in Yemen late on Tuesday, two Egyptian security sources
told Reuters-affiliated Aswat Masreya.
A
senior Egyptian military source said the forces were sent “as part of
Egypt's prominent role in this alliance,” which “fights for the sake of
our brotherly Arab states.”
The source added, “The death of any
Egyptian soldier would be an honor and considered martyrdom for the sake
of innocent people.”
However, Press Secretary for the Yemeni
Presidency, Mokhtar al-Rahby told Mada Masr that, “so far the Yemeni
presidency hasn't received any news about Egyptian forces on Yemeni
soil. There are Saudi and Qatari preparations to begin engagement with
armed militias. We’re not certain about the Egyptian situation, but
Egypt remains part of the Arab Coalition that might intervene at any
moment.”
Spokesperson for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Ahmed Abu Zeid, declined to comment on the news.
Earlier
on Tuesday, Saudi Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported that a
widespread military operation was in the works in Eastern Yemen. The
newspaper added that the task-force joining the anticipated operation to
liberate areas under the control of Houthis includes coalition forces
from Egypt, Qatar and other countries that “would arrive in areas of
Yemen other than Ma’rib within days, to provide on the ground logistical
support to the forces.”
The sources declined to name the regions
where these forces will purportedly land, adding that “they will have
specific fighting goals and will largely contribute to liberating Yemeni
regions from the hands of the Houthis.”
Meanwhile, spokesperson
for the coalition, Brigadier General Ahmed al-Assery, told Reuters that
their forces were focused on overcoming Houthi resistance in Yemen's
central and southern provinces by a “prerequisite airs campaign,” before starting the ground operation towards Sanaa.
Heavy
air strikes on Houthi sites in Sanaa have been reported throughout this
week. On Tuesday, fishermen said raids killed 20 Indian nationals off a
Red Sea port, while at least 15 other civilians were killed throughout
the country on the same day, Reuters reported.
On August 1, Egyptian authorities agreed to extend involvement in military operations in Yemen by another six months, in support of the Saudi-led coalition that has been fighting Shia Houthi groups since March.
Egypt’s
military confirmed providing the “necessary elements for the forces” in
the Yemeni conflict for a further six months, or until the objectives
are met, in order to uphold national security for Arab Gulf states, the
Red Sea region, and the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
Saudi Arabia and its
allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (with the exception of Oman) are
leading the military offensive in Yemen, claiming that Shia Houthi
rebels seized control of the state in a coup (from September 2014 until
February 2015). They allege the takeover was orchestrated by Iran in an
attempt to expand its influence in the region.
At the behest of
Saudi Arabia’s ruling dynasty, Egypt joined Operation Decisive Storm on
March 26, and continued to lend military support throughout subsequent
operations, Restoring Hope and Golden Arrow.
At the time, President
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stressed that Egypt was only participating with
naval and air forces. In an April speech at the Military Academy, he
said, “An announcement will be made if any other forces are deployed in
the operation.”
