Latest Articles

27/11/18

‘I know where her father is,’ said manager of Egypt nursery before expelling two-year-old daughter of political prisoner

On Wednesday afternoon the nursery where Rana Greash’s daughter was enrolled called her and invited her for a meeting. “My partner knows who Laila’s father is,” said the manager when Rana arrived. “He knows where her father is and has refused to allow Laila to continue at the nursery.” The manager tried to convince her partner to change his mind but he refused, so Rana gathered her daughter’s belongings and took her home. The family live in Ismailia, a city in the north-east of Egypt on the west bank of the Suez Canal, but it was in 6 October City, just outside Cairo, where Laila’s father was kidnapped on 29 February 2016. He was forcibly disappeared for a month and then brought before the State Security Prosecution on charges of assassinating Hisham Barakat, Egypt’s public prosecutor who was killed in a car bomb in 2015. Ahmad Wahdan was taken to the Scorpion, a wing within Tora Prison, which is notorious for its brutal treatment of inmates and lack of independent oversight. One year later he was sentenced to death. [ read more ]

16/11/18

Former Sinai MP: ‘Mubarak was a treasure to Israel. Sisi is much more than that’

In 2014, fresh from the coup they led against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the government offered Yehya Okail the position of deputy mayor of North Sinai. He wasn’t the most obvious choice. The 2011 revolution had elevated Okail to Member of Parliament for the Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, within the Sinai Province where he was leading demonstrations against the new military-backed government. Okail’s path to politics wasn’t exactly conventional though he had held a string of high profile positions, including Secretary of the Development Fund in his village and President of the Association for the Development of Bedouin Women. He studied mathematics, received a high diploma in Islamic studies and then in 2010 was arrested and detained for seven months on charges of espionage and colluding with Hamas. [ read more ]

08/11/18

Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée: ‘I will follow Jamal’s path’

Over the last 30 days the world has come to know Jamal Khashoggi as the journalist who was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. MEMO speaks to his fiancée Hatice Cengiz about the man she knew and loved. [ read more ]

10/09/18

Persecuted at home, denied asylum in South Korea: the Egyptians with nowhere to go

In December 2012 Abdelrahman Zaid became one of the thousands of civilians to be incarcerated in Mubarak’s sweep to end the Arab Spring. At the time of his arrest he was holding documents to say he was a Palestinian refugee due to his father’s origin and the media used this to depict him as a foreigner who had come to Egypt to make trouble. He was sentenced to five years in prison and left Egypt in six days. As he searched for somewhere to go Abdelrahman found that unlike the US and Europe South Korea offered Egyptians visa-free travel. He had the impression that South Korea was “a nice country with a good economy” and on top of this, in 1994 it had become a signatory of the UN refugee convention. He landed in Seoul on 4 April 2016. [ read more ]

20/08/18

Mystery shrouds extradition of Egypt imam from Spain

On 1 June Spanish police injected Dr. Alaa Mohamed Said with anesthetic, beat him and bundled him onto a plane bound for Egypt. For two days his wife Iman, who was then two months pregnant with their sixth child, had no contact with her husband: “I kept calling when he disappeared,” she tells me. “Once the authorities said he was there, another time that there was a problem with the phone.” Eventually Iman learnt that her husband was in Tora Prison, the notorious maximum security jail in Cairo whose degrading conditions, brutal treatment of inmates and lack of independent oversight have earned a wing within the complex the nickname Scorpion. She hasn’t spoken to her husband since the end of May. [ read more ]

22/06/18

In London, theatre is helping four young refugees process trauma

The first time Talal Hasan met Omar Almahel they slept side by side on a piece of cardboard at a train station in Brussels. Not long after this the pair climbed a bridge, jumped onto a fence below and manoeuvred themselves between carriages on a London bound Eurostar, hiding beneath the seats when ticket inspectors came down the aisle. At just 17 and 18-years-old the two young men had already undertaken an incredible journey from Darfur, a region in western Sudan that has been rocked by war since 2003. Omar paid a smuggler to take him to Libya but woke up in Chad. He was then sent back to Sudan then onto Egypt where he travelled through the desert to get to Tripoli before taking a boat to France and eventually Belgium. [ read more ]