Mohammed Kordy, his wife, two daughters
Posted on 12/22/2003 6:44:06 AM PST by miltonim
Two days after their detention, the two were transferred to a Cairo police station, where they were beaten, hung by their arms, and bloated with painful amounts of air blown into their bodies. They were denied any food while detained under intense interrogation in central Cairo’s El-Mosky police station,
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Former Muslims Forbidden to Change Their Identity Papers
In a harsh crackdown over the past 10 days, Egypt’s state security police have arrested and tortured a Christian couple from Muslim background, along with 11 other Egyptian citizens accused of forging Christian identity papers for former Muslims.
At least 10 more Christians have since been detained and subjected to torture in the sweep, said to be headed by two security police officers known for illegal and cruel tactics against Christian converts.
The convert couple, Mohammed Ahmed Imam Kordy and his wife Sahar El-Sayed Abdel Ghany, was arrested in Alexandria on October 18. The police action apparently came after the wife was implicated in a complaint extorted under police torture that she had helped another Egyptian woman secure false identity papers.
Two days after their detention, the two were transferred to a Cairo police station, where they were beaten, hung by their arms, and bloated with painful amounts of air blown into their bodies. They were denied any food while detained under intense interrogation in central Cairo’s El-Mosky police station, where they were logged under administrative case No. 3793 for 2003.
The husband and wife were not brought before the prosecutor until October 22, four days after their arrest. Under Egyptian law, the police are required to produce accused detainees before a prosecutor within 24 hours of their arrest.
The couple reportedly told the prosecutor that they had indeed changed their own names, with the husband taking the name Yousef Samuel Makari Suliman, and the wife changing her name to Mariam Girguis Makar.
However, they declared that they did not know it was illegal for them to change their religious identity. Since it was commonly known that Christians in Egypt could convert to Islam and change their identity papers, they stated, they assumed that Muslims had the same rights.
The couple named two Coptic priests who they said had helped them change their religious identity, both of whom have died in the past three years.
Although lawyers intervened to obtain the couple’s release on bail, the wife was sent to prison October 23 for a month while the case is under investigation. Her husband was ordered released but remains under charge. The couple has two teenage daughters.
Meanwhile, 11 more arrests were reported, including the arrests of three Coptic women who had converted to Islam several years ago but have since returned to their Christian faith. The three, identified as Soheir Hosni Sedky, Fawzeya Azmy Estafanos and Marina Morcos Shenouda, face charges of bribing government employees and obtaining false identity papers.
In addition, Compass has obtained the names of eight government employees known to have been arrested in connection with the case. Two of them, Reda Zaghloul and Amal Wadi’I, are women.
Another, a Christian named Aziz Zakhary Armanios, was employed in security directorate offices in Beni Swef, a governate in southern Egypt. Armanios was arrested in Cairo on accusations of preparing Christian identity papers for 2,800 Egyptian Muslims who had become Christians. His detention has been ordered extended for 45 days by the prosecutor.
Detainee Samir Sa’ad has been identified as a Coptic Christian who had converted to Islam and then tried to return to Christianity. An employee in the civil records office in Dokki, Cairo, Sa’ad was reportedly tortured to confess the names of Muslims who had converted to Christianity.
An additional 10 Christians have been detained in the widening sweep of arrests said to be organized by Lt. Sayed Zaky, a criminal investigation officer known for following illegal procedures in detaining Christians.
Although Lt. Zaky informed the prosecutor that the newly accused Christians had been arrested off the street, local sources confirmed that in fact they were taken forcibly from their homes in the middle of the night. “They were breaking down doors, searching their homes, abusing the parents in front of their children, all in a very humiliating way,” the sources said.
Those arrested are reportedly being tortured by Lt. Walid El-Dossoky, assigned to the state security police headquarters in Lazogly. Because of El-Dossoky’s long-term reputation for inflicting cruel torture upon particularly the women Christian converts, numerous complaints have been filed to human rights organizations against him.
Although Egypt’s Coptic Christians make up more than 10 percent of the national population, the government is accused of blatant “religious apartheid” for its discriminatory laws favoring the Muslim majority.
While Christian citizens who want to convert to Islam are free to adopt Muslim names and change their official religious identity, these rights are denied to Muslims who convert to Christianity. Under the law, it is not illegal for an Egyptian to convert from one religion to another, but in practice, Muslims who become Christians face arrest, torture and ongoing threats to their lives.
In the face of such persecution, many such converts have tried to change their religious status without government permission, leaving themselves open to the charge of falsifying official documents.
In the wake of this latest crackdown, a group of former Muslims who have converted to Christianity issued an anonymous declaration from Cairo on October 26.
“We are between the jaws of the constitution and the legislation,” the Christian converts stated, noting the dilemma between constitutional guarantees of freedom of belief and Islamic law demanding that unrepentant apostates be executed.
Asserting their rights as Egyptian citizens to equal treatment under the laws of the land, the converts demanded that all cases of falsified identities against Christian converts be dropped unconditionally.
“The Egyptian government is itself responsible for this illegal action,” the declaration stated, “because it has deprived us of one of our basic legal rights, to embrace a new faith and change our name, our identity and our official papers. Give us our rights, and we will not falsify these things.”
“Is it logical,” the converts asked, “that the person who chooses a religion other than Islam is accused of blasphemy, and the opposite is not applied?” In fact, the statement noted, Egypt’s Christians were all being given the freedom to change their beliefs. “But here Muslims are persecuted, because they are not enjoying that same right!”
Egypt, to coin a phrase, just quite simply sucks.
That is why every Arab country is a hellhole, they are cursed, for cursing the Jews.
I'm sure the folks at CAIR are already writing letters about this article...
...to complain about the hateful propaganda that the article projects against the loving Muhammedans!
That's the sort of Bravo Sierra we can expect from CAIR...
...or Ronly Bonly Osama, so long as Serbs are the victims.
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