Laila Soueif, mother of detained activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, released a statement on Tuesday claiming the military is continuing to detain her son despite the military prosecution’s inaction in investigating the accusations he is currently charged with.
Soueif is now on the second day of a hunger strike she launched in objection to her son’s detention.
“If Alaa is accused of stealing a weapon belonging to the Armed Forces, how have they not sent anyone to his house for a routine search for weapons?” Soueif asked. In her statement, Soueif insists that the campaign for her son’s release is part of a wider campaign to end military trials for civilians.
“I refuse that my son, or any other civilian, be tried by the military, because I have seen its real-life consequences,” she said.
Abd El Fattah's detention has attracted attention on a global scale due to his high-profile activism over the past five years. A prominent group of online hackers called Anonymous have even released a statement on their YouTube channel in solidarity with Abd El Fattah.
The group, which is a collective of anarchist activists and hackers formed in 2003 to be an anonymous online community, specializes in distributed denial-of service (DDoS) attacks on critical infrastructure components of the internet worldwide.
In a YouTube statement, Anonymous included a veiled threat to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). “We will keep our eye on you until we see real change,” the statement says.
Abd El Fattah made his name through his blog and writing on social networks. Fellow online activists are expressing their opposition to his incarceration by re-tweeting Abd El Fattah's old message denigrating military rule in Egypt. One tweet read, “Barbarism is not speaking out against torture.”
