‘Unprecedented spike’ in Egypt forced disappearances

Egypt’s police have been implicated in an “unprecedented spike” in enforced disappearances since early 2015 aimed at quashing dissent, Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday.

“Enforced disappearance has become a key instrument of state policy in Egypt. Anyone who dares to speak out is at risk,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director.

The London-based human rights group said abuses had surged since the military overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Mursi in 2013 and unleashed a crackdown on Islamist and secular dissidents.

Children were among those being kept at undisclosed locations for up to several months at a time “to intimidate opponents and wipe out peaceful dissent,” the report said.

The report documents 17 cases, including five children, who had disappeared for periods of “between several days to seven months,” according to the statement.

One of them, Mazen Mohamed Abdallah, who was 14 in September, had been subjected to “horrendous abuse” including “being repeatedly raped with a wooden stick in order to extract a false ‘confession’,” Amnesty said.

Another child of the same age when arrested in January, Aser Mohamed, “was beaten, given electric shocks all over his body and suspended from his limbs in order to extract a false ‘confession’,” said the rights watchdog.

Egyptian authorities have denied they practice torture, but say there have been isolated incidents of abuse and those responsible have been prosecuted.

The National Council for Human Rights, the country’s official rights watchdog, said on July 3 it had raised 266 cases of enforced disappearances with the interior ministry between April 2015 and end of March.

Many of them have since been accounted for.