Police have arrested 26 Internet activists in the port of Alexandria, and 14 of them were jailed for more than two weeks for “threatening national security,” a security official said on Thursday.
Around 30 young Egyptians who belong to the so-called “April 6” group on social networking site Facebook, a group which earlier this year called for a day of protests at rising prices, gathered in Alexandria on Wednesday.
“We were heading for Sidi Beshr beach, but a policeman prevented us getting there because we had a large kite painted with the Egyptian flag and we were wearing T-shirts with ‘April 6 Movement’ on,” Mohammed Abdel Aziz said.
He said that in the evening the group was walking along the seafront singing nationalist songs when police arrived and arrested 14 of them, he said.
The official confirmed the arrests and said another 12 were detained on Thursday.
The first 14 arrested have been jailed for 15 days under emergency laws for “threatening public security,” the official said, while the others are still being questioned.
The arrests “indicate the security agencies are targeting 35 young men and women who are members of the April 6 group and all attending a trip arranged by the group,” the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said in a statement.
ANHRI tried to contact those detained “but all their mobile phones are turned off, which raises concerns, especially with the well-known practice of torture,” it said.
Esra Abdel Fattah, the 27-year-old woman who set up the April 6 group in March calling for protests against price hikes, was detained at the time but freed after her mother made an appeal to Egyptian Interior Minister Habib al-Adli. Egyptian police took her from a Cairo coffee shop a week before the planned day of action.
Meanwhile, the publisher of a book critical of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime says the book has been banned in Egypt.
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan says in a statement that government censors banned the book Inside Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution by John Bradley.
There was no immediate comment from the government.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS