Freed Egyptian Protester Describes Ordeal, but Fate of Seized Blogger Is Unknown


Philip Rizk, a blogger and peace activist, was released days after being detained by Egyptian security forces after his participation in a march to raise awareness about conditions in Gaza. Christina Rizk

CAIRO — For more than four straight days, Philip Rizk said, he was blindfolded, handcuffed and interrogated around the clock by Egyptian state security agents who abducted him on Friday after he took part in a march in support of Gaza.

Early Wednesday morning, with neither warning nor explanation, he was driven home and dropped off, without having been charged.

“They said I was a liar, that I was not telling them the truth, threatening me that I would be punished in certain ways unless I gave them the whole story,” Mr. Rizk said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

His arrest and the government’s refusal to provide any information while he was in custody provoked a tremendous international response. The German government and legions of former and current classmates and professors rushed to the defense of Mr. Rizk, a dual Egyptian-German citizen who studied at Wheaton College in Illinois and is a graduate student at American University in Cairo.

His family also started a Facebook group to raise awareness of his case, and within days, more than 6,000 people around the world joined.

The Egyptian government has not explained Mr. Rizk’s arrest or his release, so it is impossible to know if his background helped.

But two hours away from Mr. Rizk’s leafy upscale neighborhood in Cairo, Amaal Abdel Fattah Taha was red in the face, sobbing in fear, terrified that her son, Diaa Eddin Gad, had been killed by the state. Mr. Gad, 23, a high school dropout and blogger, was arrested Friday, too, when four police officers grabbed him as he stepped outside the door of his family’s apartment.

Like Mr. Rizk, he was taken away after he participated in public demonstrations in support of Gaza — and in opposition to Egypt’s policies toward Gaza. And as in Mr. Rizk’s case, the government has not said where he is being held, or why, or when he may come home.

“You think they killed him? Why are they hiding him? Did they kill him?” his mother cried inside their run-down, cramped two-room apartment in a village just north of Tanta, a city in the Nile Delta region.

The Egyptian government has grown increasingly intolerant of those who criticize its policies regarding Gaza. Egypt has insisted that it is Israel’s responsibility to provide for Gaza. But because of the recent war and the humanitarian crisis there, many Egyptians have called on their government to open its one border with Gaza, at Rafah. The government has refused, except to let some medical supplies pass through.

To silence the critics, the government has turned to its internal security forces, whose ranks are twice as large as those in the nation’s military, and to an emergency law decades old that allows the police to detain anyone, effectively without charge and without explanation.

Mr. Rizk was arrested after he took part with 14 others in a peaceful six-mile walk in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Mr. Gad was arrested after he took part in a peaceful demonstration in Cairo organized by the Wafd Party, a largely powerless, secular liberal political party.