Egyptians are intensely outraged, after the murder of a 28-year old man by the police - for refusing to show his ID, in an event that forewarns large repercussions within the Egyptian society, with social media playing a central role in the affair.
On Tuesday June 8th, Khaled Mohamed Said was in an Alexandria internet café when two police informants - police foot soldiers with little to no formal training - walked in and asked to see the identification documents of all present and began searching them, claiming the provisions of the emergency law.
When Khaled refused to show his documentation, as accounted by
independent newspaper Al-Shorouk, he was attacked violently by the perpetrators, showed to the floor where the police informants kicked him. As he bloodily fainted, one of the perpetrators banged his head against a staircase railing, breaking his skull. He was then carried into the police station, then subsequently brought out again and dumped in the street by the same police informants, before he was taken by an ambulance.
Policemen subsequently returned to the scene in search of any recording devices or phones that could’ve reported the incident. They failed however to prevent the news from being covered and widely shared via Twitter and other social media tools, which detailed accounts of the events, shared photos of the deceased before and after his death, and began to organize for demonstrations and civil actions to bring the alleged perpetrators to justice and to protest the use of Emergency law, in place since 1981 and extended just last month for a further 2 years, with the explicit declaration by the state that it would only be used “in cases of terrorism and drug trafficking”.
A memorial Facebook page in the name of the victim gained
4000 followers in the first hour of its creation on Thursday; I've seen it grow, in the past 14 hours, from 20,000 to 64,000 supporters.
The Egyptian
blogosphere is in mourning - and in rage. Past events of police brutality are brought up from the archives, with parallels being drawn between victims, methods, and perpetrators.
Yet the case of Khaled Said has the potential of being the furthest reaching and can have stronger repercussions than all previous police brutality cases combined.
First, unlike most other cases of fatal police brutality, this one didn’t take place in the confines of a police station or in a remote village of Egypt’s countryside, but in broad daylight, on a street of the country’s second largest city. The victim was not in the police’s custody, or under arrest for a crime or other; he was, until minutes before the events,
Second, the very graphic images of the tortured body of Khaled Said also gained an unprecedented distribution among social media users.
Third, the government has failed to absorb the rising rage or to offer, as it did for instance with the
torturers of Imad Al Kabir, to bring the perpetrators to justice. Quite on the contrary, its reaction is setting it on a collision course with the Egyptian civil society.
According to the respected Al-Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of victims of violence and torture, a Thursday 70-person strong demonstration by the Sidi Gaber police station in Alexandria - where Khaled died - ended in the police beating up the demonstrators and arrested 11 persons, including two journalists and Khaled’s female cousin.
The incident has also gained significant attention from opposition political parties and movements, whose interest, genuine or not, is unlikely to falter any time soon.
Al-Ghad party president Ayman Nour, who had finished a distant second in the 2005 presidential elections before he was imprisoned,
posted a note depicting the events and condemning police brutality; he also changed the profile picture of his facebook fan page into Khaled’s, in solidarity.
Supporters of former IAEA director general and presumed presidential hopeful Mohamed el Baradei have
issued a statement demanding that the perpetrators be brought to justice and calling upon popular solidarity to “drastically change the roots of the regime".
Earlier today, El Baradei’s official twitter account tweeted the following:
“Horrible reign of terror continues in Egypt. Criminals must be brought to justice immediately. Khaled's life must not be lost in vain.”
(His message in Arabic was a little different - he added that "Khaled's murder is the responsibility of every Egyptian")
Even the near-defunct ‘6th of April movement’, which once commended a strong mobilisation base, has joined the calls to demonstrate before the ministry of interior on Sunday.
How this affair will end is anyone’s guess, but the level of outrage surrounding it feels almost unprecedented. The intensity of the public action is bound to be met by a reaction: either a further violent one, as the demonstration in Alexandria suggests, or a more conciliatory, by bringing the perpetrators to justice. But if the campaign is sustained - and the ingredients for a long term action seem present - it could lead to deeper repercussions on the way the Ministry of interior, one of the state’s
most powerful branches and armed with one of the most permissive legal texts ever created, deals with the Egyptian populace.
Already, organisations such as the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI)
declared that are expressing severe discontent with the impunity of the Ministry of Interior: “those informants (...) are regular police officers who were transformed, thanks to the policy of impunity, to sadistic killers above the law, this policy must be stopped at once, and no less than putting them, and the Minister of Interior who's the first responsible for this sadistic crime, on trial".
It is a sad day in Egypt, and the shared hope is that, at least, Khaled’s death would not have been in vain.
