Nov. 7 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The prominent Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdelfatá has taken another step in the hunger strike he is holding to demand his release and has stopped drinking water to coincide with the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP7) in the Egyptian city from Sharm el Sheikh, as announced by his family.
“My brother has just had his last glass of water in prison. Please keep the story alive, it is not over. He can be saved,” said his sister and also an activist Sanaa Seif through her account on the social network Twitter. .
For her part, Mona Seif, also an activist and sister of Abdelfatá, stressed that “Alaa has won this round.” “No matter how it ends, she will be free from the horror of (Egyptian President Abdel Fatta) Al Sisi’s prisons.” “It will be us who will suffer a great loss, but the whole world, including the governments of Egypt and the United Kingdom, although they do not see it now,” she warned.
The 40-year-old activist has been eating only one hundred calories for more than 200 days to demand that the Egyptian authorities allow him consular access to the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised to “address at the highest levels” the release of Abdelfatá and has denounced the “unacceptable treatment” of him in a letter sent to Sanaa Seif.
For her part, the secretary general of the non-governmental organization Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, met on Sunday with the activist’s mother, Laila Suef, in Cairo. “Mother courage. Inspiring. Moving. Human Rights Activist. Her son is the imprisoned activist Alaa Abdelfatá- He stopped drinking water after 219 on a hunger strike. Al Sisi has a few days to save a man’s life,” he said, before demanding his release.
Abdelfatá, an important Egyptian blogger and one of the main figures of the popular uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011 in the framework of the ‘Arab Spring’, has been in prison for nine years and in 2021 he was sentenced to another five-year prison sentence for ” dissemination of false news”, charges that various NGOs have branded as false.
Al Sisi came to power through a coup in July 2013 that he led after a series of massive demonstrations against the then president, the Islamist Mohamed Mursi, the first democratically elected president in the country and who died in 2019 during a court hearing against him. after his arrest after the coup.
The leader has promoted a broad campaign of repression and persecution against opponents, both liberal groups and Islamist organizations –declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization–, an initiative that Human Rights groups have denounced as the most serious in recent times.
