CAIRO (AP) --
People living on Badr el-Din street say they found the two young men
dumped in a pile of rubbish by a park on July 27. Amr Mohammed Salim,
22, a street vendor, was dead, hands bound and body covered with gashes,
residents said. Hany Moussa, a 24-year-old kitchen helper, was still
alive, but barely.
They were found just three
blocks from where followers of Egypt's ousted President Mohammed Morsi
are camped in protest at the new military-backed government, and what
happened to them is a mystery that ties in with the tumultuous events
and fierce recriminations that have engulfed Egypt over the past five
weeks.
Egyptian authorities and the media say
that nearly a dozen bodies have been discovered close to Cairo's two
mass sit-ins for Morsi, and that all were victims of pro-Morsi
protesters who took them for government spies. The London-based Amnesty
International says it has collected evidence (is it evidence? Or just
reports?), including testimony from survivors, that Morsi supporters
have tortured members of rival groups.
But
Islamist participants in the sit-ins deny that they have tortured
anyone, and, unlike many of the more notorious incidents of violence
that have occurred throughout over two years of political turmoil in
Egypt, these alleged abuses have not been caught on video.
Meanwhile,
the allegations have often gotten lost amid a tide of less credible
media accusations against the demonstrators - for example, that they are
non-Egyptian Islamists, drug-users, or children recruited from
orphanages. These lead many to suspect that they might be propaganda as
well.
The bodies and the torture allegations
fuel demands (from both sides of public opinion?) that the security
forces move quickly to break up the sit-ins. But international pressure
has mounted on Egypt's government to avoid a repetition of the July 26
clashes in which over 80 protesters were killed by the security forces,
and diplomats including U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns are
trying to mediate a solution.
If the
mediation fails, the notion that Islamists are torturing citizens in two
lawless enclaves in Cairo will pressure the government to use force and
risk another bloodbath.
On Badr el-Din
street, witnesses refused to give their names because they did not want
to get caught up in the conflict. But Hany Moussa's identity was
confirmed by his brother Mohammed, who picked up his injured brother.
Now, Mohammed says, the young man is lying in a Nile Delta hospital with
internal bleeding and 45 stitches in his head.
"He's
fighting for his life," Mohammed said, and most of the time "he doesn't
even recognize his father or mother." But he says that his brother has
had moments of consciousness during which he has spoken about three
bearded men who beat him with sticks and iron bars, leading his brother
to blame the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hany Moussa
was found just after the July 26 clashes. He worked at a nearby
military-owned hotel, and would just have finished his shift when he was
attacked.
This fits a pattern in the
allegations. Many of the victims appear to have been seized after
clashes, either because they were from an anti-Morsi group or because
they were mistaken for police auxiliaries.
Media
reports and testimony suggest others were street vendors who flock to
the sit-ins to sell their wares. Protesters have long believed that some
of these vendors are police spies.
The almost
festive atmosphere at the sit-ins, where families gather to break the
dawn-to-dusk Ramadan fast and young men cheerfully proclaim their
willingness to die for the cause, makes it hard to imagine the abuses
alleged to be occurring here. But sometimes a flare-up offers a glimpse
of the tensions under the surface.
At the
Rabaa sit-in on Monday, Saadiya Hasan Amin tearfully shoved away food
offered to her by sit-in participants so she could break her fast.
Instead, she demanded that they tell her what had become of her son
Mohammed, who went to the protest that morning to sell water and never
came home.�
"He was a thug," interrupted one
member of the sit-in's orange-vested security team, using an Arabic word
also applied to petty criminals in the pay of the police. The sit-in
security says he smoked drugs in front of demonstrators at prayer, and
was ejected from the sit-in.
The sit-in
participants deny the abuse allegations, pointing out that they
themselves were victims of torture by the security forces before Egypt's
2011 uprising. They say some of the bodies may have been dumped by the
police - who rights groups say routinely torture and sometimes kill
political opponents and criminal suspects alike.
"That
talk is lies, we refuse torture. We ourselves were tortured," said
Abdel Majid Barakat, official on the Rabaa sit-in's committee of safety
and organization.
Sit-in organizers invite
journalists to go wherever they want in the camps. But the encampments
sprawl over streets, gardens, and residential areas with many hidden
corners. Some local media accounts suggest that jihadist-leaning groups,
more radical than the Brotherhood, take charge of security and may be
responsible for much of the abuse.
Meanwhile, rights groups say the evidence of torture is strong.
"It
is established that there are some deaths as a result of the
detentions," says Heba Morayef of the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
She says they fit a pattern over the past two years in which
protesters, especially during the tensest demonstrations, have detained
and often abused suspected spies.
Egypt's
street protests have long been accompanied by violence. Mobs have
attacked both pro- and anti-Morsi marches, sometimes with firearms.
Dozens of people on both sides have been killed in such clashes in the
last year alone.
Protesters have seized
suspected police infiltrators since the early days of the 2011 uprising,
when demonstrators detained dozens in Tahrir Square's metro (subway
station?). The more graphic accusations of torture however are more
recent, and have mostly been directed against Islamists.
According
to the Amnesty report, Mastour Mohamed Sayed, 21, said he was attacked
by a group of Morsi supporters near the Rabaah al-Adawiya on 5 Jul
(???), early in the standoff. He said he was driven to the sit-in, held
under a podium, beaten with bars, and given electric shocks.
Hassan
Sabry, 20, said he was dragged by armed assailants into a park
adjoining a second sit-in at Cairo University. He says he was handcuffed
with plastic wires, and beaten with sticks. He told Amnesty he saw one
protester have his throat slit and another being stabbed to death.�
"These
are unprecedented levels of violence ... also not terribly surprising
given the extreme levels of tension and paranoia," Morayef says.
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