November 15 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Egyptian activist Alaa Abdelfatá has ended the hunger strike that began more than 200 days ago to demand his release, as reported by his sister and also an activist, Sanaa Seif.
Abdelfatá has sent his family a letter in which he confirms that he has ended his hunger strike and asks that for Thursday, the day a visit from his relatives is scheduled, they bring him a cake to celebrate his birthday.
“The most important thing is that I want to celebrate my birthday with you on Thursday. I haven’t celebrated anything for a long time, and I want to celebrate with my cellmates, so bring me a cake and some supplies. I have broken my (hunger) strike.” , reads the letter from Abdelfatá collected by Seif in a publication on Twitter.
Abdelfatá’s relatives have denounced in recent weeks the lack of information about the activist’s state of health, until on Monday Seif herself also reported on social networks that they had received a letter from her brother, something she celebrated as a ” life test”.
Abdelfatá intensified his hunger strike on November 6, when he also stopped drinking water as an attempt to further pressure the authorities for his release, coinciding with the start of the Climate Summit (COP27).
Days later, Cairo indicated that he had undergone a “medical intervention” and assured that he was in good health. On Monday, Abdelfatá confirmed in the aforementioned letter that he had once again drank water.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, demanded last week the “immediate” release of Abdelfatá, a leading Egyptian blogger and one of the main figures in the popular uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011 within the framework of the ‘ Arab Spring’.
The activist has been in prison for nine years and in 2021 he was sentenced to another five-year prison sentence for “spreading false news”, charges that various NGOs have called false.
The current Egyptian president, Abdelfatá al Sisi, came to power through a coup in July 2013 that he led after a series of mass demonstrations against the then president, the Islamist Mohamed Mursi, the country’s first democratically elected president and who died in 2019 during a court hearing against him after his arrest after the riot.
The leader has launched a broad campaign of repression and persecution against opponents, both from liberal groups and from Islamist organizations –going so far as to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization–, an initiative that Human Rights groups have denounced as the most severe in recent times.
