Hostage-Taking and Abuse of Female Detainees
Human Rights Watch has collected information about cases of arbitrary detention of family members by security forces, in violation of Article 9(1) of the ICCPR, which protects the right to liberty; these cases date back to 1990. Once detained, family members—including mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—have been subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. These incidents have occurred in major cities, including Cairo, and in towns and villages throughout the country.
In 1990, for example, a fifty-three-year-old mother of seven was illegally detained for six days at the local police station in Minya, a city south of Cairo. The security forces lashed her with a whip that cut her skin while arresting her. She was detained because her sons were suspected of involvement with militant Islamist groups. "I was a hostage," she told us. "They did this to me because they wanted my son Hamdi, who was not yet sixteen years old. My son Sayyid came to visit me on the fourth day of my detention. They took him to SSI and beat him and then detained him for six months. . . . It was all done to threaten us. They told me that my sons should not have contact with Islamic groups."124
In December 1991, in Domyat, on the northeast Mediterranean coast, relatives of suspects were detained following an attack that wounded security officer Major Mutawwi Abu al-Naja. According to the written report of a local lawyer, security forces "went on a rampage" in the village of al-Wasil after the attack, raiding houses and rounding up many youths. "If they entered a house and did not find anyone they wanted," the lawyer wrote, "then they would . . . arrest whomever they found—a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, and would hold them as hostages until [the suspect] surrendered himself.125
Hostage-taking and other forms of pressure of families increased in 1992, when authorities began an all-out crackdown on militant Islamists. As political violence mounted in Upper Egypt that year—with police and security forces, Christians and tourists attacked by armed Islamists—families of those suspected of involvement in this violence were increasingly targeted and mistreated in detention.
Hostage-taking in the oasis city of Fayoum, southwest of Cairo, followed the killing of an SSI officer there on March 3, 1992. According to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), relatives of the wanted suspects were detained at the al-'Azab prison and the paramilitary Central Security Forces camp located fifteen kilometers from Fayoum, for periods of from twenty-four hours up to ten days. At the camp, security forces degraded wives of fugitives by forcing them to strip naked and placing them in a closed room with naked, male detainees. They abused the women in order to coerce from them information about the hiding places of fugitives.126
On April 28, 1992, forty-year-old police officer Mukhtar Ahmad Dawud was shot dead in an ambush in Isna, in Upper Egypt, as he was riding home on his motorcycle. After the officer's killing, security forces laid siege to Mat'ana, a village just north of Isna, and took hostages, "starting with the heads of every big family, old men, sixty and seventy years old," according to a lawyer from the area. "Then they came back and took the women, about fifteen of them, old and young." He said that the women were insulted and cursed, kicked in the legs, and spat upon if they asked to use a bathroom.127
In December 1992 family members were taken hostage when a massive number of security forces moved on Imbaba, the densely populated Cairo slum where Islamist militants maintained a strong and visible presence. The EOHR cited hostage-taking as one of the abuses carried out by security forces, in addition to mass arbitrary arrests, temporary disappearances and widespread torture. The EOHR reported that wives, mothers and sisters of wanted suspects were detained and, in some cases, degraded or tortured. "Some of the women held were subject to severe torture by the police officer of Imbaba police station for the whole duration of their detention which included beatings with [sic] rod and the handling of the genitals and forcing them out of their clothes."128 The latter form of mistreatment causes great mental anguish in a culture that highly values female modesty.
Abuse of female family relatives of suspected Islamist militants taken hostage by security forces continued in 1993 and 1994. In a 1993 case of hostage-taking in a town in Upper Egypt, "The mother was tied with her hands behind her back. They threatened to rape her if her [wanted] son did not showup in two days."129 The brothers of the wanted man and their wives also were detained. According to a local lawyer, the women were blindfolded, bound, slapped, beaten with a heavy leather whip, and threatened with rape. The wives were held for one day and then released.
124 Interview, Minya, February 1992.
125 This report was obtained in February 1992, when Human Rights Watch representatives visited Domyat.
126 EOHR, "Torture in Egypt/Central Security Forces Camps" (Cairo, December 10, 1992), p. 11.
127 Interview, Cairo, February 1993.
128 EOHR, "Imbaba: An Intense Image of the Deterioration of the State of Human Rights and Respect of the Law in Egypt" (Cairo, March 20, 1993), p. 6.
129 Interview, Upper Egypt (name of town withheld), July 1994.
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