On Tuesday evening, families of detained journalists and activists in Egypt demanded their release.
At a press conference, the families threatened to go on a hunger strike until the release of Abdallah al-Shami, the AlJazeera correspondent who has been detained since the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in.
Shami’s wife, Gehad Khaled, said her husband staged a hunger strike for being detained without charge for doing his job.
She held the Interior Ministry, the National Council for Human Rights and other authorities responsible for the safety of her husband and the other detainees.
Laila Suef, mother of activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, urged the Journalists Syndicate to exert more effort to defend detained journalists.
“Imprisonment really means deprivation of freedom not the humiliation of the body,” she said. “Prison conditions are improper and laws allowing long pre-trial detention should be changed.”
Hoda Abdel Moneim of the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory said many young people were arrested for merely disagreeing with the regime.
“Defendants are innocent until proven guilty,” she said. “With the exception of Mohamed Abdel Qoddous, the Journalists Syndicate has done nothing for those detained."
Syndicate member Abdel Rahman Rady, son of the Muslim Brotherhood leading figure Mohsen Rady, claimed his father has been detained for nine months on charges of inciting violence in five fabricated cases.
“My father suffers severe psychological and verbal insults by the prison administration,” he said. “He is denied the medicine he needs.”
Meanwhile, Mohamed Sultan, a detained Egyptian-American, appealed to US President Obama for his release.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
