Egypt: Girl ‘disappeared’ after demanding justice for father killed by police

A human rights group said on Monday that Egyptian security forces killed a farmer and then forcibly disappeared his daughter because she spoke out about his case.

Last Monday, 50-year-old Ali Shaaban Farhan Salem was killed by police in broad daylight with a “close-range shot to the head,” a human rights group said, citing his daughter’s eyewitness account of the incident in Asyut, Upper Egypt.

Following the incident, his 16-year-old daughter Nadia Salem released a Facebook video shared by the Egyptian Network for Human Rights (ENHR), documenting what had happened to her father and calling for the murderers to be brought to justice.

According to ENHR, Nadia has been missing since June 1, the day after the video was released.

The London-based human rights group reported that Nadia, who lives in the Arab village of Al-Matir in Asyut, was forcibly disappeared shortly after she and her uncle were summoned to police headquarters for questioning.

The ENHR added that she continues to be detained incommunicado without legal basis and that the police deny any responsibility for her disappearance.

Statement from the daughter

According to Nadia, her father Salem was shot dead at close range by personnel from Sahil Salim police station at around 12:30 pm on May 27 while he was picking okra with his daughter and brother.

After the attack, police officers threatened the witnesses and loaded the body into a police vehicle. They accused Salem of possessing weapons and drugs and of resisting authorities.

According to ENHR, several eyewitnesses denied the police allegations.

“The ENHR reiterates its rejection of the excessive use of force and killings by members of the Egyptian police and security forces,” the human rights group said in a statement.

“The claim that the victims shot at the security forces first contradicts the truth and eyewitness accounts,” it said.

Nadia was arrested after publishing her eyewitness account of the incident and demanding an official trial of the police forces responsible for killing her father in broad daylight and repeatedly shooting her and another eyewitness.

Nadia, along with other witnesses, reported that her father, a social worker who was managing agricultural land he owned at the time, was neither armed nor resisting the authorities.

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Nadia said her father tried to “move his tricycle out of the way of a car,” and police got out and shot him.

She further stated that when she and her uncle Abdul Karim Farhan tried to help her father, another police car drove by and shot at them “from all directions”.

At the end of the video, she demanded that “her father’s murderer be brought to justice.”

Under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, thousands of cases of arbitrary detention were reported, with many prisoners remaining in prison for years.

Cases of enforced disappearances are not uncommon and some detainees remain missing for weeks or even years.

Sisi, who is due to rule until 2030, secured a third term in December after a decade of political repression and economic malaise.

Egyptian opposition politician Ahmed Tantawy, who ran against Sisi in December’s election, was recently arrested and fined for allegedly circulating election-related materials without official permission.