CAIRO — As world leaders arrived last week in Egypt for the U.N. Climate Change Conference, the country’s most famous political prisoner — on a hunger and water strike in a prison outside of Cairo — was in such distress that he repeatedly smashed his head against his cell wall, prompting prison officials to put him on suicide watch, his family said Thursday.
Egyptian dissident had ‘near death’ experience while on hunger strike, family says
Alaa Abdel Fattah, who turns 41 on Friday, has been jailed on and off for about a decade, and is currently serving a five-year sentence for “spreading false news undermining national security.”
His case took center stage at COP27, where he became a symbol of the widespread government repression that has suffocated Egyptian civil society. Despite Abdel Fattah’s dual citizenship, Egyptian officials have not allowed Britain consular access to him in prison.
Abdel Fattah’s family knew from a letter he had written to them that on Nov. 6, the day COP27 began, he planned to escalate his long-term hunger strike and stop drinking water.
But since then, there had been almost no news of what was happening behind the walls of the Wadi el-Natrun Prison where he is being held. At the climate summit, several world leaders directly raised his case with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, the only Egyptian official with the power to pardon him. None were able to provide an update on his condition.
Abdel Fattah’s family feared he was dead. Prison authorities eventually said they had “medically intervened” on his behalf. His relatives did not receive confirmation that he was alive until Monday, when prison officials presented a handwritten letter that said he had started to drink water again and would explain more soon.
A brief family visit with Abdel Fattah on Thursday — the first since October — allowed relatives to begin piecing together a rough timeline, though they were separated from him by a glass barrier and could speak to him only through a headset. This visit, his sister Sanaa Seif said, marks “the first time I don’t send an update to the British Embassy because I feel like they have failed us.”
On Nov. 8 — two days after he stopped drinking water and a day after Sisi promised French President Emmanuel Macron that he would ensure Abdel Fattah’s health — Abdel Fattah and his cellmates were ordered to submit to a medical check, his aunt, novelist Ahdaf Soueif, told reporters in Cairo on Thursday evening. “They were pressuring them to submit to a medical examination so that they could produce a medical report,” she said.
Earlier this year, Abdel Fattah’s family accused authorities of faking a medical report and denying his hunger strike was real.
This time, Abdel Fattah refused to leave the medical center unless his strike was acknowledged and he was placed under medical supervision. Eventually, riot police carried him back to his cell, Soueif said. It was at that point, he told his relatives, that he “lost it.”
“He had a meltdown, and he promised to kill himself if he was taken back to the cell,” Soueif said.
After Abdel Fattah smashed his head against the cell wall, officers restrained him and put him on suicide watch. The next day, he hit his head again until he started to bleed, hoping it would “force the authorities to file an official report on his case and to bring in an investigator.” A bruise was visible on Thursday, his sister said.
On Nov. 10, as Abdel Fattah’s lawyer was denied entry to the prison and his mother waited outside for news, a representative from the office of the public prosecutor visited him and took notes about his loss of hope and how his life had been harmed by authorities denying him access to books and music for three years, Soueif said.
The next day, as President Biden visited Egypt and met with Sisi, Abdel Fattah collapsed in the shower and eventually lost consciousness in what he described to his relatives as a “near death” experience. When he came to, he told them, a cellmate was cradling his head and there was an IV in his arm.
“They gave him electrolyte fluid, a spoonful of honey, a pickle,” Soueif said. “There were lots of people there and there was an urgent need to save his life.”
On Monday, he “began to eat of his own will again,” she said.
His family said he appeared thin and weak on Thursday, and at times had to lean against a wall for support. For more than 200 days this year, he ate no more than 100 calories per day. He stopped eating on Nov. 1, then gave up water.
He told his sister he was considering restarting the strike immediately. She urged him to let his body recover.
But, Soueif said, “he will have no choice but to resume his hunger strike imminently if there continues to be no real movement on his case.”
Source: WP
