7 painful stories ... the tragedies of husbands and wives in Sisi's prisons

Cairo - private

The Qur'an spoke of a "heavy covenant" between the two spouses, but under the Sisi rule the matter turned into a heavy restriction where the couple sits in prison, leaving young children and questions about the cause of all this cruelty.

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Days ago, the two girls whispered and Haya Hassan Al-Qabbani celebrated their birthday, which happens for the first time in the absence of both the father and mother, after they celebrated three times before in the absence of the father who was arrested in early 2015 and released in late 2017 with precautionary measures.

The father was the target of the usual accusations leveled by Sisi’s authority to its opponents, foremost among which was joining a banned group, in reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as promoting false news and other repeated accusations.

As soon as the father settled for months next to his small family, the tragedy of the young mother, Aya Alaa, who was arrested while performing the duty of condolences for the family of the late President Mohamed Morsi, who died in his prison last January, began the charge of communicating with "hostile" channels, in a sign To appearing on opposition channels during her husband’s imprisonment to demand his release.

The young father lived through difficult periods next to his two young daughters (whispered 8 years and hey 6 years) and in the absence of the mother's wife, he could only use his personal pages on social media to explain the tragedy of his family and demand the release of his wife.

Hassan was writing the details of his suffering as a father who suddenly found himself exercising the role of father and mother together, then going to the police station to spend the precautionary measures, which were a condition for his release from pre-trial detention pending his case.

But the authority, which human rights organizations say arrested 40,000 Egyptians, was not satisfied with what it did towards this small family. Last September, it re-arrested al-Qabbani on new charges, to remain whispered without a father or mother, in the care of Uncle Hussein al-Qabbani.

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In the period after the January 2011 revolution, a television channel requested to host the professor at Al-Azhar University, Mahmoud Shaaban, so they required that the interviewer be a man, but he went to the studio and found that the interviewer would be anchor, “I forgot to wear her clothes according to what he said”, and he declined to participate, saying, “Come to me A man "(bring me a man anchor).

But the media, angry at the emergence of the Islamic voice in that period, grabbed the phrase and used it to distort the man and his stream, so that he ended up after Sisi turned on his elected president, Mohamed Morsi, to the prison where he remained until mid-2016.

But the preacher Al-Azhari returned to the prison again in the middle of this year, and it is interesting that they are almost the same accusations leveled against him in 2014 and that included with him a number of leaders of the Salafi Front, and more surprisingly, that his wife also found her way to prison although she was traveling from Cairo to Ismailia, where she was arrested by the police and her 12-year-old son, without any legal basis or clear accusations, according to human rights sources, who confirmed that they are still in the stage of enforced disappearance until now.

During Sisi's era, the Egyptian police used to arrest some opponents without announcing that they are often tortured in the state security headquarters for weeks, before suddenly appearing in one of the prosecution offices, where accusations against them often revolve around the most common charge of joining a banned group.

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Press photographer Hossam Al-Sayyad was sitting at a cafe in Dokki neighborhood with his wife, journalist Slava Magdi, but security personnel in civilian clothes stormed the cafe and arrested them with a third journalist who was sitting with them, Mohamed Salah, in addition to closing the cafe and arresting a number of his workers.

No one yet knows why Hossam and his wife are arrested, although some believe that this is due to their relationship with the journalist Esraa Abdel Fattah, who was one of the prominent faces of the January 2011 revolution, but in all cases Khaled, Hossam's son and predecessor, remains lonely and sad in caring for his father’s family and awaiting the return of parents Not sure why he was deprived of them.

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Writer and activist Naglaa El-Qalioubi has passed the age of seventy, and for six years she has shown steadfastness in support of her detained husband Magdy Ahmed Hussein, who heads the Independence Party, as well as being one of the most prominent Egyptian journalists, especially in the area of ​​fighting corruption.

Last September, the police raided the lady’s house and blindfolded her and took her to an unknown location, so the university professor remains in enforced disappearance before it becomes clear that she is behind prison bars, in case a “brutality of the Egyptian regime” appears and violates all rights and freedoms, according to Salma Ashraf, who is responsible for the Egyptian file in Human Rights Watch.

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On June 30, 2017, the four-year anniversary of the 2013 coup, Nizam al-Sisi apparently chose to celebrate by putting other Egyptians in the dark of prisons, and this time it came to Ola al-Qaradawi, daughter of the scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, with her husband Hossam Khalaf, a party leader. The middle, to continue behind bars for the third year in a row.

The charge was to belong to a terrorist group, but last July the prosecution decided to release them, but it is strange that the State Security Prosecution decided to imprison her again, pending a new case related to terrorist financing (from inside the prison).

Ola rejected all the allegations against her, while her daughter Aya Hosam posted a video on YouTube saying, "My mom is dying in prison, every renewal session we find her health condition is weaker than the previous one, at some point the detainees should be allowed to return home to their children and grandchildren."

Hossam has completed his sixtieth year, behind bars, he may have hoped to celebrate reaching this age among his children and grandchildren while he is holding the hand of his wife to cross a new age, but the brute authority has another opinion, while Amnesty International says that the arrest of Ola al-Qaradawi is arbitrary, and it is targeted because Her father's connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Because wives often remain in the women's prison in Qanater, north of Cairo, while husbands migrate to Tora Prison Complex, south of Cairo, Husam meets his wife for about two minutes, every 15 days, when the time for their presentation to the prosecution coincides.

The children of Basma Rifaat and her husband, Colonel Yasser Arafat, have not yet reached an age that allows them to realize that they will grow up without a mother or father next to them.

The father is a former colonel in the armed forces. He was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for participating in the assassination of the public prosecutor. The authorities then attached his wife to him during her visit, and she remained in prison for months before receiving a sentence of 15 years.

The prosecution says that Basma confessed to the crime, but Basma told the judge that she confessed under torture and the threat of rape.

In one of the sessions, Basma told the judge that her infant child no longer knew her, and looked at her with a pair of eyes each time they brought him to her.

As for her five-year-old, she started her first school year without her mother, and both the baby and the little girl are in my father's smile, and they are two sick old people.

And if the previous cases can enjoy a law that allows the release of one of the parents sentenced for less than a year - according to lawyers - then the case of Yasser and Basma does not apply to this law, and yet it remained a feature related to the cilia of hope that the judge will see his condition, especially that she suffers from heart disease and needs Transfer to the prison hospital, considering that the sentencing of them is also a judgment on the children.

The situation is not different from the husband who is in Scorpion prison, under the most severe conditions of detention, and he is forbidden to visit and to see his children, and his health deteriorates successively, as he suffers from an enlarged liver and gallstones.

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In early November, security forces stormed the house of Islam Hussein and his wife, Mai Abd al-Sattar, and took them and their two children, Faris, to an unknown location.

The family tried to find the location of the couple and the infant in vain, then the response came from the police with a new raid targeting the wife's father's house where her brother Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who recently ended a three-year prison term in a political case, was arrested.

The infant, who is now four months old, may be happier than other children, as he is in the arms of his mother, but together they are behind bars.