Allegations of a criminal act have emerged from the relatives of a Central Security Forces conscript who was found hanging inside his camp in al-Shorouk city, east of Cairo. The Interior Minister has declared the death a suicide, but the soldier’s family has suspicions of foul play.
Bishoy Kamel, 21, from the Upper Egyptian province of Minya, was found hanging inside the bathroom of a prison cell at his camp. The Interior Ministry said on Saturday that Kamel apparently felt he was being unjustly punished after he was confined along with a colleague as a disciplinary measure.
But his family said there was a criminal element to his death.
Sami Beshri, Kamel’s cousin, told Al-Masry Al-Youm that the conscript had gotten in a fight with another colleague, prompting their superiors to lock them up.
"I took a lawyer and visited Bishoy last Wednesday. He and his colleague had agreed to reconcile, yet both were kept in the same cell. We were surprised later with the news of Bishoy’s death,” said Beshri who said that his cousin’s stable mental condition rules out the possbility of suicide.
Sherif Nady, an MP for Minya’s Mallawi, to which the dead soldier belongs, urged the Interior Ministry to investigate the incident with “transparency”. He said postmortem checks had revealed internal bleeding in Bishoy’s stomach which, he argued, were a sign of a “severe injury that preceded his death by hanging.”
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
