A policeman who was convicted of raping and torturing a microbus driver while a fellow officer took video with his mobile phone has been returned to the police force. The reason, according to the Ministry of Interior, was that the officer "wasn’t convicted for a moral issue." According to human rights activists and law experts, this officer’s situation is not unusual. Moreover, these experts say, as long as there are no changes to the law, police officers convicted of crimes–even torture and abuse–will continue to return to the force.
Captain Islam Nabih’s sodomy of Emad el-Kebir became one of the most notorious cases of police abuse in Egypt’s recent history. The case first came to light when the video, filmed in the Bulaq el-Dakrour police station by Corporal Reda Fathy, appeared on the blog of Mohamed Khaled, also known by his alias Demagh Mak. The video, which graphically depicted Nabih beating and sodomizing el-Kebir, spread like wildfire throughout blogs and social media networks, and was later picked up by mainstream news outlets. Human rights groups in Egypt and around the world decried the brutality. El-Kebir was sentenced to three months in prison for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.
El-Kebir pressed charges against the two policemen and won the case in 2007. Nabih and Fathy were sentenced to three years in prison with hard labor, in an unprecedented case that received much hype in international media. The case, though, was relatively simple. Thanks to the officers, the main piece of evidence was readily available online.
Nabih and Reda were released in March after serving only three quarters of their sentence and were quickly returned to the police force, even maintaining their previous ranks and titles, in Assiut Governorate. The decision was met with furious reactions from human rights groups, including pro-democracy groups in Assiut, and a lawsuit filed by a group of lawyers in the administrative court calling for reversing the decision and dismissing the two officers was rejected only last week.
But opposition to the officers’ reinstatement is weak, according to Khaled, who first blew the whistle. "Yes, Nabih’s case is not unique. But the difference is that this time the case is documented," says Khaled. "The Interior Ministry waited three years and then returned them to the force. What does this mean? It means that torture is systematic and happens with the approval of the ministry. It means they know it happens and they okay it."
"This defies what the ministry has been feeding the press by saying that torture is punished and that the practice is exceptional," Khaled adds. "The Facebook group that was created in the wake of the decision to return them to the force is not enough. Where are our representatives in parliament? Shouldn’t they be objecting this?"
Khaled says that people should "go down to the streets and protest this … We’re talking about a case of a police officer, not only beating a citizen, but raping him and recording it on video. And it’s a first that people actually see with their own eyes that this happens in custody. But here we are, the Interior Ministry is returning mentally unstable individuals to the force."
But according to Gamal Eid, the director of the Arabic Center for Human Rights Information, there isn’t much that local forces and human rights groups can do. "This always happens with police officers involved in torture cases," says Eid.
In a case documented by Eid’s advocacy and human rights center, a police officer called Mohamed el-Sharkawy was similarly returned to the police force in 2005 after being charged with torturing an entire family in Helwan to extract confessions from them. El-Sharkawy, in an attempt to catch a fugitive criminal who was a relative of the family, assaulted and beat them to pressure them to divulge his whereabouts, despite lacking evidence that any of the family members knew where the suspect was hiding.
"This officer has resumed work without incident and has been transferred to different stations across the country. It’s the same case, only with Islam Nabih, it’s become crystallized because his conviction was final."
Eid says that for human rights advocates, Nabih’s case holds a silver lining by proving that the Ministry of the Interior’s attitude towards such matters is "both undisputed now and documented." Eid’s organization will put this news in a report intended for the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is expected to consider Egypt’s human rights dossier on 17 February. The council will issue a review of the state of human rights in Egypt, and several local groups have already sent a laundry list of violations to be considered in the review. Torture in police custody was one of the main concerns raised in these reports. According to Eid, Nabih’s case will serve as a perfect example.
Still, the main issue is legislation. Current police laws make the return to service after committing such crimes not just a practice, but an obligation in cases where the officers were not involved in crimes that "defy morality," according to a rough translation of the law. Such crimes include stealing, drug dealing, smuggling, and blackmail but not torture or mistreatment of prisoners or those in custody.
The law states that if a police officer or any other public employee is imprisoned for a period of fewer than three years, he or she should be allowed back into service after serving the sentence unless a court decides against it, according to Nasser Amin, el-Kebir’s lawyer and the head of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary.
"The court sentence should have included expulsion from the force. Otherwise, it’s up to the department which the policeman is under to force him out of service or not," Amin says. "Normally, the Interior Ministry sends them back into the force."
This, more than anything, is what must change, according to Amin. "This is what we’re trying to do now: calling for the cancellation of this law, especially in cases that involve extreme cruelty and which involve the relation between the executive force and the citizens." Amin says. "Otherwise, it’s not going to end here and we’ll keep seeing repetitions of the Emad el-Kebir case."
Brigadier-General Hani Abdel Latif, a spokesperson from the public relations department of the Ministry of the Interior, told Al-Masry Al-Youm that he could not comment on a "legal matter" and promised to have the ministry’s legal department get in contact with Al-Masry Al-Youm before publishing. "There’s a legal framework for this that needs to be explained and considered," he said.
Al-Masry Al-Youm never heard from the legal department.
