Authorities in Egypt have informed the family of prominent activist Alaa Abdelfatah that a «medical intervention» has been carried out on the detainee, who recently refused to drink water after more than 200 days on hunger strike against his imprisonment.
«We have just been informed by prison officials about a ‘medical intervention’ on Alaa with the knowledge of judicial bodies,» Mona Seif, Abdelfatá’s sister and also an activist, said through a message on her Twitter social network account.
She also stressed that his mother, also activist Laila Suef, or a representative of the UK Embassy in Cairo «must see him» to «understand what his real health situation is». The Egyptian government has not yet commented on the situation.
The announcement came two days after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, called on Egypt to «immediately» release Abdelfatah, who on Sunday stopped drinking water as part of a hunger strike that began in April.
Abdelfatá, a leading 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 was sentenced to another five-year prison term for «spreading false news», charges that several NGOs have branded as false.
The current Egyptian president, Abdelfatá al Sisi, came to power in a coup d’état in July 2013, which he led after a series of mass demonstrations against the then president, the Islamist Mohamed Mursi, the first democratically elected president of the country, who died in 2019 during a court hearing against him following his arrest after the uprising.
The leader has promoted a broad campaign of repression and persecution against opponents, both liberal groups and 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 serious in recent times.
