Cairo – Seven rights organisations condemned on Thursday an Egyptian court’s decision to shelve further investigations into the death of an economist in state custody.
The family of Ayman Hadhoud, who said the researcher vanished on February 5, were called in April to “retrieve the body” from a state mental health facility in Cairo. Hadhoud had reportedly died there in March.
The official investigation reported medics had diagnosed Hadhoud with “schizophrenia” and that he had died of “a chronic heart condition.”
Police have denied Hadhoud was “forcibly disappeared”, while the official investigation said there was “no criminal suspicion” in his death.
But his brother Omar Hadhoud on Thursday alleged Ayman “was murdered”, saying he had been “threatened and asked to change” his findings of Egypt’s dire economic situation by parties he refused to name.
In May, the United States urged a “credible investigation”, with State Department spokesman Ned Price saying Washington was “deeply disturbed” at allegations of Hadhoud’s “torture while in detention.”
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On June 23, a criminal court upheld the decision to shelve the investigation, rejecting an appeal filed by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression.
The Egyptian rights groups had called for an examination into surveillance camera footage of the area he was in before he disappeared.
The court’s decision to stop further investigations raises “more concern about the reasons and motives for closing the case without seriously considering the evidence and suspicions”, the two rights groups said Thursday.
Five other rights organisations also signed a joint statement.
Egypt ranked in the lowest group on the Global Public Policy Institute’s Academic Freedom Index in 2021, five years after the torture and murder of Italian PhD candidate Giulio Regeni in Egypt in 2016.
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Source: AFP
Picture: Pixabay
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