The Unknown Man, and the Deaths at Abu Zaabal

On the afternoon of August 18, 2013, thirty-seven men died in a metal box. The box, which measured about six feet by twelve feet, was the holding compartment of a prison transport van, surrounded by police officers and parked in the courtyard of the Abu Zaabal military prison. The prison is forty kilometres northeast of Cairo, in a desert area that includes industrial chemical plants, factories, and Egypt’s last functioning leper colony.

Most of the men had been arrested four days before, during the dispersal of a sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque, in Cairo. They were under investigation for a variety of charges, including vandalism and assault. For seven weeks, tens of thousands of Egyptians, many of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had organized the sit-in, had been gathering at the site to protest the Army’s removal of President Mohamed Morsi. On the same day as the arrests, security forces killed more than six hundred of the demonstrators there, as well as dozens more at Nahda Square in Giza, the site of a second sit-in. What were thirty-seven more deaths against these hundreds? But these men had been killed in police custody. They had yet to be formally charged with a crime.

The men were put into the van at around 6:30 in the morning and were driven to Abu Zaabal, where they waited to be transferred to prison custody. They were handcuffed together in pairs. Around 10:30, after they had been locked in the van for four hours, the police tried to open the door. None of the officers could find the key, so they broke the lock. The police splashed the prisoners with water and then locked the door by using a pair of metal handcuffs. They may have opened it once more in the course of the day. For six hours, the men in the van slowly suffocated as the temperature climbed to ninety degrees.

Some time between 1:30 and 2 P.M., the guards went to open the van’s door again, but could not. While many of the prisoners were struggling to breathe, an officer shot tear gas inside. After ten minutes, the police pried open the door with a blowtorch and a crowbar to find a terrible scene. Only six or seven men remained conscious. The rest appeared to be dead. One of the officers shocked a few of the bodies with an electric baton to check, but none moved. A few minutes later, the prison doctor arrived and reached the same conclusion.

Who killed these men? More than a year and a half later, the Egyptian state has failed to come up with an answer. Two competing narratives have played out in court over the past year. (Patrick Kingsley, writing for the Guardian, reconstructed the events of the day.)

In the survivors’ version, several of the prisoners fainted, including some who fell directly behind the van’s door. Seemingly because they could not open the door, the police released tear gas into the compartment. In the police version of events, the prisoners grabbed Police Lieutenant Mohamed Yehia when he entered the compartment to check on them, and beat him severely. An unidentified officer shot the tear gas in an attempt to save the life of an officer in danger, and to subdue the prisoners, who were trying to escape.

At around 5 P.M. that day, Egypt’s Ministry of Interior published a series of three bulletins on their Facebook page. The first announced that “members of the Muslim Brotherhood organization” had attempted to escape during their transfer to Abu Zaabal prison. An hour later, the ministry posted an update, noting that “during the handling of the situation, the detainees captured an officer from their security detail, and the security forces are currently undertaking to free him.” Around 7 P.M., the ministry announced that police had freed the officer. “The forces used gas in order to control the situation, resulting in cases of suffocation among a number of the detainees who are now being treated.” No further updates were posted. Later, investigations revealed that most of the men had died in the early afternoon, several hours before the ministry published its first urgent bulletin.

Gamal Siam, whose son Sherif was among those arrested, was following the news with a growing sense of dread. Earlier that day, he and his wife had spent hours going from office to office, trying to get permission to visit Sherif and to secure his release. Siam is a professor at Cairo University and a former adviser to the Minister of Agriculture; like anyone who has encountered the Egyptian prison system, he had been frustrated by bureaucracy and misinformation through official channels. The day had ended, though, on a hopeful note. That afternoon, Siam had visited Egypt’s public prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, to tell him that Sherif’s arrest was a mistake. Sherif was not a member of the Brotherhood, he insisted. (At the time of Sherif’s arrest, it was not yet illegal to be a member of the Brotherhood: the government officially declared the group a terrorist organization on December 25, 2013.) Siam told Barakat that the family lived at the edge of the Rabaa sit-in, and that Sherif’s workplace was also nearby. Barakat seemed sympathetic, and signed a paper requesting inquiries into the case. He assured Siam that as long as Sherif had no prior criminal record, he would be released quickly.

That evening, when Siam saw the news, he tried to stay calm. “I kept trying to convince myself that this wasn’t happening to [Sherif],” he told me. But around 7 or 8 P.M. Al Jazeera began broadcasting the names of the detainees killed at Abu Zaabal. Sherif’s name was among them. “It was a very dangerous moment for me,” Siam said.

The morning after the deaths, I went to Cairo’s Zeinhom morgue, where the bodies of the prisoners had been delivered. It was a grim and chaotic scene. Only one morgue in Cairo—a small, shabby cinder-block building surrounded by dirt lanes—is authorized to carry out forensic examinations. After the killings at the Rabaa and Nahda Square sit-ins, more than seven hundred bodies had arrived in the space of days. The morgue had no space to hold them all, and after five days the surrounding alleyways were still filled with corpses wrapped in white sheeting, resting in plywood coffins, and rotting in the heat. Family members had bought ice and some sort of chemical, attempting to preserve the bodies of their loved ones. The smell was overpowering: sweet and putrid, overlaid with the sharp sting of disinfectant.

Families and lawyers of the Abu Zaabal victims packed together in the morgue’s narrow entry, pounding on the metal gate to the examining rooms. A few men, relatives and friends of the dead, climbed the gate and filmed the scene on the other side through a grate at the top. One showed me what he had captured. Bodies lay wrapped in white sheeting on the floor of the corridor, some of them partially uncovered to reveal rough, raw incisions sutured back together on their chests. “They’ve been burned!” people screamed when they saw the videos. Osama al-Mahdy, a lawyer and a friend of Sherif’s, had gone to the morgue earlier that morning and taken photos of Sherif’s body, which quickly circulated online. Sherif’s face was badly swollen, and his skin had turned a deep indigo-black, the result of rapid and severe decomposition in the heat.

The Abu Zaabal trial culminated seven months later, on March 18, 2014. It was held at the Cairo Police Academy instead of in a civil courtroom. Only a few of the families of those killed, and a few of the eight survivors, attended the trial. Meanwhile, the courtroom was packed with friends of the accused, fellow police officers in uniform.

Mohamed Abdel-Maboud was among those who survived; he only came to the academy for two pretrial court sessions. Abdel-Maboud is a forty-three-year-old seed-and-fodder merchant who lives in a small village two hours from Cairo, in the governorate of Sharqiya. Prosecutors interviewed him only once, waking him up at 2 or 3 A.M. the day after the incident. That was when he learned that the rest of the detainees in the van had died. “I never imagined that they were dead,” he told me. “I was in shock.”

After his release, prosecutors never tried to interview him again, Abdel-Maboud told me, and they did not ask him to testify in court, though he volunteered to do so.

During the investigations, an expert engineer found that the van could hold no more than twenty-four people, not the forty-five it had carried. Another investigator found that the van’s vents weren’t working. Though most of the officers testified that the detainees had tried to attack Lieutenant Mohamed Yehia, one rank-and-file policeman, Abdelaziz Rabia Abdelaziz, confirmed the prisoners’ version of events. The prosecutor’s deposition noted that at the beginning of their interview, “the officer burst into violent sobs, fearing for his future and the future of his children.”

Abdelaziz testified that the other parts of the officers’ version of events were wrong, too. The prisoners didn’t try to seize Yehia or escape at any point. Abdelaziz said that his commanding officer, Amr Farouq, who was responsible for the prisoners’ transport, repeatedly denied his requests to open the van door to give the prisoners air. Abdelaziz also said that, after the deaths were discovered, one of his fellow-officers, who was wearing a heavy ring, hit another officer in the face to produce evidence of injury. Several higher-ranking officers who were not personally implicated in the incident testified that Farouq’s version of events was “not logical,” and speculated that he and the other officers had come up with the story to avoid blame.

The trial lasted between four and five hours. At its conclusion, the judge sentenced Amr Farouq to ten years imprisonment. The three officers assigned to assist him received suspended sentences of a year and were released on probation. (The officers’ defense counsel appealed the verdict.) To the survivors and the victims’ families, this was no kind of victory at all: the sentencing took place in a country where hundreds of people received death sentences in a single case. “How can ten years be enough?” Siam said to me.

A week later, the Minister of Defense, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, officially renounced his position in the Army so that he could run for election. Since July 3, 2013, when the military removed Mohamed Morsi from Presidential office, Sisi had represented the political face of the military government far more than the interim President, Adly Mansour, who had been installed in Morsi’s place. In the months following Morsi’s ouster, Sisi became an immensely popular figure. In May, he won the elections by an overwhelming majority, with more than ninety per cent of the vote, and was inaugurated as President on June 8, 2014.

On December 27, 2014, the television channel al-Sharq, known for its pro-Muslim Brotherhood slant, aired a leaked recording, allegedly of Abbas Kamel, Sisi’s chief of staff, and Mamdouh Shahin, an Army general and the military’s chief legal adviser, discussing the case in Kamel’s office immediately after the officers were sentenced. “I’ll speak to the judge,” Shahin promises. “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” The recording, part of a series of releases called “SisiLeaks” by the press, was never confirmed by a government source.

On June 7, the day before Sisi’s Presidential inauguration, the Abu Zaabal case was decided in appellate court. The judge quickly dismissed the survivors’ version of events. He found that Farouq had followed orders by not leaving the van door open and had done his best to provide for the prisoners’ needs, as evidenced by his willingness to break the van’s lock to splash them with water when the key could not be found.

The guilty party, the judge concluded, was a shakhs maghoul, or “unknown person”: the officer who fired the tear gas but was never identified in prosecutors’ interviews with the police officers. The court ordered the prosecutor’s office to reopen its investigations to find this shakhs maghoul.

Farouq and his three supporting officers were pronounced innocent, and Farouq was released from custody. “Long live justice!” the policemen and their supporters chanted. The verdict was confirmed by Egypt’s highest court in January.

The shakhs maghoul is a useful concept in thinking about Egypt’s justice system. The number of deaths caused by Egypt’s police has accumulated steadily over the past four years, yet most remain unaccounted for in its courts. During the eighteen days of uprising in early 2011, at least eight hundred and forty-six protesters were killed by Egyptian police; more than a hundred and fifty policemen were charged, but only two spent time in jail. On August 14, 2013, just four days before the deaths at Abu Zaabal, hundreds of men and women were killed during the dispersal of the Rabaa Mosque and Nahda Square sit-ins. In February this year, at least twenty soccer fans were killed at a game after a police attempt at crowd control went wrong. No police officer has been prosecuted for their deaths. Families and activists have struggled to keep individuals from being forgotten amid the mounting dead. Finding a face for the killers is even more difficult.

Gamal Siam told me that he sent letters to the Ministry of Interior and to the President’s office, asking for an explanation of what happened to his son. “They’re throwing words on top of words, and the person who’s accused is ‘unknown,’” he said. “That, specifically, increases our pain.” He has received only condolences for his loss.

These days, reports about the case are few and far between. They no longer make front-page news; just a few sentences convey the latest procedural update. A retrial began on March 18th, exactly a year after the first trial court’s verdict, to little fanfare. The case was postponed to call more witnesses and Farouq was returned to detention.

Siam will keep attending the court sessions. “But I don’t have too much hope for justice,” he told me. “Not one officer has been convicted. It’s very sad for us and we feel like it’s not our country. Because you don’t have any justice in it . . . and we, the other side, can’t speak.” His fingers trembled as he talked, folding and unfolding the edge of an envelope.

Mohamed Abdel-Maboud, one of the survivors, told me that his friends and family warned him to stay quiet about the case, fearing that he will face consequences for speaking about what happened. “Anyone who lives through a situation like that has to do what they can,” Abdel-Maboud said. “I will never have any fear greater than what has already happened to me.”

Sometimes, family members and survivors of Abu Zaabal reach out to each other and meet. In Egypt, where the government has accused the victims of being members of the Brotherhood and the media has picked apart and politicized their deaths, it’s difficult for those involved to find sympathy among their friends. Abdel-Maboud has visited Gamal Siam and his wife, and the family of Mohamed el-Deeb, another detainee who died inside the van. “They want to know the details of their sons,” he said. “They want to know if he had any last words, if he died in pain. I try to tell them what I know.” What he knows may not matter in an Egyptian court, but to the families of the dead it matters a great deal. Quiet words in living rooms—this may be their only answer.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-unknown-man-and-the-deaths-at-abu-zaabal

Life under Sisi.