Egyptian security forces arrest the wife and son of a jailed preacher

Abdel Rahman Mohamed-Cairo

Egyptian security forces arrested the wife and son of the preacher and professor of rhetoric at Al-Azhar University Mahmoud Shaaban while traveling from Cairo to the eastern city of Ismailia, and took them to an unknown location.

According to human rights sources, the arrest of the wife and son of Mahmoud Sha'ban detained in Egyptian prisons took place on Tuesday evening, without legal basis or clear charges, and the whereabouts of their detention is not yet known.

The sources said that the people of Sheikh Mahmoud Shaaban were keen at first not to announce the news, in the hope that the arrest will not continue much, especially since the son of Sheikh Moaz is 12 years old, but the lack of appearance and failure to know the place of detention led them to communicate with human rights Different.

Sheikh Mahmoud Shaaban was arrested for the second time from his home north of Cairo in May in a case targeting the leaders of the "Salafi Front", in which he was accused of joining a banned group established contrary to law and the constitution.

According to researcher and human rights activist Ahmed al-Attar, it has become common practice for Egyptian authorities to arrest women and children and whole families - including infants - and hide them for months, perhaps more than a year.

Al-Attar said in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net that the arrest of the wife of the preacher Mahmoud Shaaban and his son Moaz is consistent with the behavior and methodology of the authorities established since the military coup and based on disregard of any human rights or international conventions, before they are legal or constitutional standards.

The director of the International Peace Organization for the Protection of Human Rights Alaa Abdel-Monsef said that the arrest comes as a kind of indulgence in the political retaliation practiced by the Egyptian government and its security apparatuses with regard to the abuse of dissidents and their families in violation of the law and the Constitution and international conventions.

Abdel-Monsef said in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net that this is a natural product of the absence and absence of the idea of ​​monitoring and accounting for any person who performs these procedures, which unleashes the hands of the authorities and their security apparatus with oppression in various ways and means even if they violate the rights of detainees.

Egyptian activists expressed their condemnation of the arrest of the wife of Sheikh Mahmoud Shaaban and his son, and considered this to cross all the red lines, and expressed sympathy with him, calling on Sheikh Al-Azhar Ahmed Tayeb to intervene to release the wife of Mahmoud Shaaban professor at his university.