DID MORSIS GOVERNMENT COVER UP A POLITICAL MURDER?

Mohamed El-Gendy, a popular activist, was last seen alive at around 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 28, when he
said goodnight to a journalist friend near Cairos Tahrir Square and headed home. When Gendy
didnt show up at a planned march the next day, his cellphone switched off, his friends grew
alarmedespecially because he had recently received threatening texts, telling him to stop his
activism.
Gendy, 30, was an organizer with the opposition movement the Popular Current and a multilingual
tourism guide. He liked arranging for food at sit-ins, and was beloved by friends, who remember him
as a kind, generous man. When Ihab Ghobashy, a close friend, lost his job, Gendy discreetly paid
his rent.
Ghobashy looked all over Cairo for his friend, searching police stations and hospitals without luck.
The only trace of Gendy he found was at the Red Mountain police camp on the citys outskirts. A
training facility for riot police, it housed detainees during Hosni Mubaraks reign. While not an official
prison, during the days of unrest surrounding Gendys disappearance, it swelled with political
prisoners again.
Demonstrators, to honor the two-year anniversary of the revolution against Mubarak, were massing
to protest President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, accusing the government of
overreach. At the same time, three cities in the Suez burst into unrest, leading Morsi to declare a
state of emergency. Speaking of counterrevolution, Morsi warned on Jan. 27: If I see that the
homeland and its children are in danger, I will be forced to do more than that.
Three days later, Ghobashy and a few friends approached the camp with a photo of Gendy, which
they showed to a handful of teenage boys who had just been released. The boys, Ghobashy and
his friends say, recognized the photo and said Gendy was still inside the camp, badly beaten. The
next day, Gendys friends staged a protest demanding his release.
Ghobashy was at the Popular Current offices in Cairo when he heard that Gendy had been found at
Helal Hospital. Rushing there, he found Gendy in a coma. He had a brain hemorrhage, fractured
ribs, and a badly battered face. Within the week, Gendy was dead.
Ghobashy and his friends say they had already searched for Gendy at Helal in the first few days
after he disappeared. But according to the hospital, Gendy was there all alongadmitted in the
early hours of Jan. 28, the victim of a hit-and-run. As proof, the hospital provided a patient entry log,
which was obtained by Newsweek. On it, Gendys national ID number is listed alongside the entry
for a 16-year-old boy, also named Mohamed, but with a different family name.
Certain that hospital officials were covering up police abuse, opposition activists began to draw
parallels between Gendy and Khaled Said, the Alexandria man whom police beat to death in 2010,
sparking the revolution. Soon, Gendys bespectacled likeness appeared in graffiti portraits on walls
around Cairo.
Police abuse defined the Mubarak era. Defending itself against charges of excessive force, Morsis
government claims such methods are a holdover from the pastand the Interior Ministry is resistant
to change.
Gendys death, however, has been hard to explain away amid mounting public pressure. Before the
release of the autopsy report, Morsis justice minister said that Gendy had indeed been killed in a
hit-and-run incident, leading activists to suspect a cover-up reaching into the government. When the
autopsy report was released days later, sticking to the hit-and-run verdict, they saw it as part of the
liein 2010, authorities had likewise issued a contested medical report claiming that Said had
choked to death on a bag of marijuana.
In the ensuing uproar, Egypts prosecutor-general ordered another medical review, which a panel of
three doctors completed earlier this month. We rule out the possibility of a hit-and-run, the report
says. Gendy likely died by being beaten violently. Doctors leave the door open for investigators to
determine if the death was a result of torture or not.
Gendys friends believe he was targeted for his anti-Morsi activism, citing the recent threats
against him.
At the time of Gendys disappearance, Amn al-Markazy camps around Cairo were rife with prisoner
abuse, according to Maha Youssef, the legal director at El Nadeem Center, an Egyptian NGO that
works with victims of torture and violence. Red Mountain held about 200 prisoners, most of them
younger than 18. Citing accounts from released detainees, Youssef says that uniformed police and
men in civilian clothes regularly beat prisoners using fists, boots, sticks, the butts of guns, and
occasionally electric prods. They also interrogated prisoners with questions about their opposition to
Morsi: Who is paying you? Are you a follower of [opposition leaders] Mohamed ElBaradei or
Hamdeen Sabahi? Answer! Answer!
Most of the prisoners were rounded up in protests, but Gendys friends believe he was targeted for
his anti-Morsi activism, citing the recent threats against him. One of his last tweets called Morsi a
dog, railing against his full allegiance with the Interior Ministry.
Mr. Morsi and his people the Brotherhood have canceled justice in Egypt, says Salah Gaber,
whose 18-year-old son, an honor student known as Gika, was killed by police. In November, Gika
was facing down riot police when, according to two witnesses cited in a police report, one officer put
on a black mask before firing directly at Gika with a long-barreled black gun. I suddenly found
blood spurting in large volumes from his chest, neck, and right arm, one witness said in the report,
which was obtained by Newsweek. Gika had administered a Facebook page called Together
against the Brotherhood. Days earlier, the young administrator of a popular Facebook page called
Brotherhood Liars was killed in similar circumstances.
Unconfirmed kidnapping accounts have also surfaced with increasing regularitypart of what
Mohamed Zidan, an investigative journalist with the newspaper Al Watan, sees as a campaign
against secondary level activists who are more vulnerable than their better-known counterparts.
Eslam Mahmoud, 17, says he was kidnapped and threatened by the police in cooperation with the
Brotherhood, because they have a common interest.
Gehad el-Haddad, a senior official and spokesman with the Muslim Brotherhood, says the
government is alarmed at such reports of police abuse, but that reform of the security forces will
take time. You have a police force that is 100 percent trained to be a bashing machine, he
says. To shift the balance is something thats going to take years.
Haddad says many in the Interior Ministry remain suspicious of the Brotherhood, a group
suppressed by the Egyptian government until the revolution. Indeed, he says, the security forces
abuse may be a way for them to undermine Morsi: if such rogue actors continue their bashing,
anger will eventually be directed at the government.
But the opposition claims the Brotherhood has been cooperating with police in some cases of
abuse, citing the December clashes outside the presidential palace in which, according to news
reports and human-rights groups, Morsi supporters detained, beat, and interrogated protesters
while police stood idly by. Ola Shahba, a prominent activist who was detained, says she saw Morsi
supporters assault male prisoners as the police looked on.
Haddad says that theres no evidence the detainees were beaten or that the Brotherhood was
involved.
But Gendys legal team is trying to tie the Brotherhood to a similar allegation. Sherif al-Behairy, a
former supporter of the Brotherhoods political party, claims that members of the group brought him
to the Red Mountain camp in late January to find bad guys [who] took money to destroy the ruling
system. Once there, they beat and interrogated prisoners. One of the prisoners he saw at the
camp, he says, was Gendythough police had already battered him so badly, he was left alone. In
an interview withNewsweek, Behairy said that when he realized the detainees werent thugs but
young activists, I woke up.
The Brotherhood has dismissed Behairy as a liar, and one anonymous text on his phone has even
threatened him with a jail sentence for giving false testimony. And aside from Behairy, no one has
said they saw Gendy at Red Mountain.
Officials, meanwhile, are standing their ground, though the justice ministerin an embarrassing
turnrecently claimed that he only stood by the contested hit-and-run report initially because the
interior minister asked him to.
Alaa al-Asas, the doctor who conducted Gendys autopsy and wrote the initial report, says he is
convinced Gendy was killed in a traffic accident and expects a recently commissioned third report to
prove him correct. He says activists are projecting their revolutionary hopes onto GendyThey
want a symbol, and when Khaled Said was a symbol, they succeeded, he saysbut have picked
the wrong case. I see many cases of [police] torture. This is not a strange thing, Asas says. We
proved this many times.
LA MUERTE DE UN ACTIVISTA DE FACEBOOK

CUBRI EL GOBIERNO DE MORSI UN ASESINATO POLTICO?
Mohamed El-Gendy, activista popular, fue vista por ltima vez alrededor de las 2:30 am del 28 de
enero, cuando se despidi a un amigo periodista cerca de la plaza Tahrir de El Cairo y se dirigi a
casa. Cuando Gendy no se present a una marcha prevista al da siguiente, su telfono celular
apagado, sus amigos se alarmaron, sobre todo porque haba recibido recientemente los textos
amenazantes, dicindole que se detenga su activismo.
Gendy, 30, era un organizador con el movimiento de oposicin al actual popular y un gua turstico
multilinge. Le gustaba hacer arreglos para la comida en el sit-ins, y era querido por amigos, que lo
recuerdan como un tipo, hombre generoso. Cuando Ihab Ghobashy, un amigo cercano, perdi su
trabajo, Gendy pag discretamente su alquiler.
Ghobashy mir con todo El Cairo para su amigo, buscando las comisaras y los hospitales sin
suerte.El nico rastro de Gendy que encontr fue en el campamento de la polica de Montaa Roja,
en las afueras de la ciudad. Un centro de formacin para la polica antidisturbios, que acoga a los
detenidos durante el rgimen de Hosni Mubarak. Aunque no es una prisin oficial, durante los das
de disturbios que rodea la desaparicin de Gendy, se hinch con los presos polticos de nuevo.
Los manifestantes, en honor al segundo aniversario de la revolucin contra Mubarak, se estaban
concentrando para protestar por el presidente Mohamed Morsi y la Hermandad Musulmana,
acusando al gobierno de extralimitacin. Al mismo tiempo, tres ciudades de la Suez estall en
disturbios, llevando Morsi para declarar un estado de emergencia. Hablando de "contrarrevolucin",
Morsi advirti el 27 de enero: "Si veo que la patria y sus hijos estn en peligro, me ver obligado a
hacer algo ms que eso."
Tres das ms tarde, Ghobashy y unos amigos se acercaron al campamento con una foto de
Gendy, que mostraban a un puado de muchachos adolescentes que acababan de ser
liberados. Los chicos, Ghobashy y sus amigos dicen, reconocieron la foto y dijo Gendy todava
estaba dentro del campamento, golpeado brutalmente. Al da siguiente, los amigos de gendy
realizaron una protesta para exigir su liberacin.
Ghobashy estaba en las oficinas populares actuales en El Cairo, cuando se enter de que se haba
encontrado Gendy a Helal hospital. Corriendo, encontr Gendy en coma. Tuvo una hemorragia
cerebral, fractura de costillas, y una cara mal maltratadas. Dentro de la semana, Gendy estaba
muerto.
Ghobashy y sus amigos dicen que ya haban buscado Gendy a Helal en los primeros das despus
de su desaparicin. Pero de acuerdo con el hospital, Gendy fue all todo-admiti lo largo de la
madrugada del 28 de enero, la vctima de un hit-and-run. Como prueba, el hospital proporciona un
registro de entrada del paciente, el cual fue obtenido por la revista Newsweek. Sobre ella, el
nmero de identificacin nacional de Gendy aparece junto a la entrada de un joven de 16 aos de
edad, tambin llamado Mohamed, pero con un apellido diferente.
Seguros de que los funcionarios del hospital estaban encubriendo abusos policiales, activistas de
la oposicin comenzaron a trazar paralelos entre Gendy y Khaled Said, el hombre a quien la polica
golpe a Alejandra a muerte en 2010, lo que desat la revolucin. Al poco tiempo, la semejanza
con gafas de Gendy apareci en los retratos de graffiti en las paredes alrededor de El Cairo.
Abusos policiales define la era Mubarak. Defenderse contra las acusaciones de fuerza excesiva,
sostiene el Gobierno tales mtodos de Morsi son un vestigio del pasado-y el Ministerio del Interior
se resiste al cambio.
La muerte de Gendy, sin embargo, ha sido difcil de explicar en medio de la creciente presin
pblica.Antes de la publicacin del informe de la autopsia, ministro de Justicia de Morsi dijo que
Gendy de hecho haba muerto en un incidente de hit-and-run, lo que lleva a los activistas a
sospechar de un encubrimiento metiendo la mano en el gobierno. Cuando el informe de la autopsia
fue puesto en libertad das ms tarde, se pegue al veredicto hit-and-run, lo vean como parte de la
mentira-en el ao 2010, las autoridades haban emitido asimismo un informe mdico impugnada
alegando que Said se haba asfixiado en una bolsa de marihuana.
En el alboroto que sigui, fiscal general de Egipto pidi otra revisin mdica, que un panel de tres
mdicos complet a principios de este mes. "Nosotros descartamos la posibilidad" de un hit-and-
run, dice el informe. Gendy probablemente muri "por haber sido golpeado con violencia." Los
mdicos dejan la puerta abierta a los investigadores a determinar "si la muerte fue consecuencia
de la tortura o no."
Los amigos de gendy creen que fue dirigido por su activismo anti-Morsi, citando las recientes
amenazas contra l.
En el momento de la desaparicin de Gendy, campamentos Amn al-Markazy alrededor de El Cairo
estaban llenos de abusos a prisioneros, segn Maha Youssef, el director jurdico de El Nadeem
Center, una ONG egipcia que trabaja con las vctimas de la tortura y la violencia. Montaa Roja
llevaron a cabo cerca de 200 prisioneros, la mayora de ellos menores de 18 aos. Citando relatos
de detenidos liberados, Youssef dice que la polica y hombres vestidos de civil golpearon
regularmente uniformados prisioneros usando puos, botas, palos, culatas de armas de fuego, y
picanas elctricas ocasionalmente. Tambin interrogaron a los presos que tengan preguntas sobre
su oposicin a Morsi: "Quin te paga? Eres un seguidor de [los lderes de la oposicin]
Mohamed ElBaradei o Hamdeen Sabahi? Respuesta! Responda! '"
La mayora de los prisioneros fueron detenidos en las protestas, pero los amigos de gendy creen
que l fue atacado por su activismo anti-Morsi, citando las recientes amenazas contra l. Uno de
sus ltimos tweets de Morsi llama un "perro", despotricando contra su "lealtad completa" con el
Ministerio del Interior.
"Mr. Morsi y su pueblo la Hermandad han cancelado la justicia en Egipto ", dice Salah Gaber, cuyo
hijo de 18 aos de edad, un estudiante de honor conocida como Gika, fue asesinado por la
polica. En noviembre, Gika fue hacia abajo cuando la polica antidisturbios, segn dos testigos
citados en un informe de la polica, un oficial se puso una mscara de negro antes de disparar
directamente a Gika con una pistola de can largo negro. "De repente me encontr con que sale a
borbotones de la sangre en grandes volmenes de su pecho, el cuello y el brazo derecho", dijo uno
de los testigos en el informe, el cual fue obtenido por la revista Newsweek. Gika haba
administrado una pgina de Facebook llamada Juntos contra la Hermandad. Das antes, el joven
administrador de una pgina de Facebook popular llamada Hermandad Liars fue asesinado en
circunstancias similares.
Cuentas de secuestro sin confirmar tambin han salido a la superficie con regularidad cada vez
mayor-parte de lo que Mohamed Zidan, periodista de investigacin con el peridico Al Watan, ve
como una campaa contra los activistas de "nivel secundario", que son ms vulnerables que sus
contrapartes ms conocidas. Eslam Mahmoud, de 17 aos, dice que fue secuestrado y amenazado
por "la polica, en colaboracin con la Hermandad, porque tienen un inters comn."
Gehad el-Haddad, un alto funcionario y vocero de la Hermandad Musulmana, dijo que el gobierno
est alarmado por los informes de abusos de la polica, pero que la reforma de las fuerzas de
seguridad tomar tiempo. "Usted tiene una fuerza policial que es ... 100 por ciento entrenado para
ser una mquina de golpear," l dice. "Para cambiar el equilibrio es algo que va a durar aos."
Haddad dice que muchos en el Ministerio del Interior se mantienen a sospechar de la Hermandad,
un grupo reprimido por el gobierno egipcio hasta la revolucin. De hecho, dice, el abuso de las
fuerzas de seguridad puede ser una manera para que socavan Morsi: si esos "actores sin
escrpulos" continan su "bashing", la ira con el tiempo se dirige al gobierno.
Pero la oposicin afirma que la Hermandad ha estado cooperando con la polica en algunos casos
de abuso, citando los enfrentamientos diciembre frente al palacio presidencial en la que, segn
informes de prensa y los grupos de derechos humanos, los partidarios de Morsi detenidos,
golpearon e interrogaron a los manifestantes mientras la polica estaban de brazos cruzados. Ola
Shahba, un destacado activista que fue detenido, dice que vio a Morsi partidarios de asalto
reclusos varones como las policas miraban.
Haddad dice que no hay pruebas de que los detenidos fueron golpeados o que la Hermandad
estaba involucrado.
Pero el equipo legal de Gendy est tratando de atar a la Hermandad a una denuncia similar. Sherif
al-Behairy, un ex partidario del partido poltico de la Hermandad, afirma que los miembros del
grupo que lo llevaron al campamento de Montaa Roja a finales de enero para encontrar "los
malos [que] tom el dinero para destruir el sistema de gobierno." Una vez all, vencieron e
interrogados prisioneros. Uno de los presos que haba visto en el campo, dice, era Gendy-aunque
la polica ya le haban maltratadas tan mal, l se qued solo. En una entrevista
con Newsweek, Behairy dijo que cuando se dio cuenta de que los detenidos no eran matones, pero
los jvenes activistas, "me despert."
La Hermandad ha desestimado Behairy como un mentiroso y un texto annimo en su telfono
incluso le ha amenazado con una pena de crcel por dar falso testimonio. Y aparte de Behairy,
nadie ha dicho que vean Gendy en Red Mountain.
Los funcionarios, por su parte, estn de pie firmes, aunque el ministro de Justicia, en un
vergonzoso giro recientemente afirm que l slo estaba junto al informe de hit-and-run impugnada
inicialmente, porque el ministro del Interior se lo pidi.
Alaa Al-Asas, el mdico que realiz la autopsia de Gendy y escribi el informe inicial, dice que est
convencido de Gendy muri en un accidente de trnsito y espera un tercer informe encargado
recientemente a probar lo correcto. l dice que los activistas estn proyectando sus esperanzas
revolucionarias en Gendy-"Ellos quieren un smbolo, y cuando Khaled Said era un smbolo, lo
lograron", dice-, pero han elegido el caso incorrecto. "Veo muchos casos de [la polica] tortura. Esto
no es una cosa extraa ", dice Asas. "Hemos demostrado muchas veces."