The mother of jailed politician Mohamed El-Qassas died Thursday, two days after prison authorities refused to accept his family’s urgent visit request, his wife said.
Iman El-Baddiny, wife of the researcher and deputy head of the Strong Egypt Party, said his mother died today while El-Qassas remains imprisoned in Case 1059 of 2021 (State Security Emergency). The Prisons Sector had refused to accept an “urgent humanitarian” petition seeking a temporary supervised release so he could visit her at home due to her “deteriorating and critical” health condition.
El-Baddiny said on Tuesday that she had submitted a request to the interior minister and the head of the Community Protection Sector (formerly the Prison Service) asking that El-Qassas be granted “humanitarian leave under official escort” to see his 85-year-old mother. The sector, she added, refused to receive it.
Defense lawyer Mokhtar Mounir said that under the Prisons Authority Law and its executive regulations, the power to grant temporary humanitarian leave rests with the interior minister or the governor of the prison holding El-Qassas.
He told Al Manassa that the defense had also submitted the request to the public prosecution responsible for enforcing sentences, but that office “refused to accept the application” as well.
El-Qassas is no longer in pretrial detention, explained Mounir. He is serving a sentence in one case while another has been sent to trial, placing the issue beyond the jurisdiction of the prosecution that oversaw the earlier investigation.
Mounir noted that had El-Qassas been in pretrial detention, the prosecution could have approved the visit. “The court is not in session on his case at present, so it cannot issue a permit,” he said.
Given the procedural complexity, Mounir said the defense will not file new petitions for El-Qassas to attend his mother’s funeral or condolence gathering. The decision, he stressed, lies solely with the Interior Ministry and the Prisons Authority.
In its petition, the family said El-Qassas’s mother, Afaf Mohamed, was suffering from advanced rheumatoid disease, acute joint degeneration, near-total immobility, and a persistent high fever that left her bedridden. They described the case as “exceptional and urgent.”
According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights/EIPR, El-Qassas was arrested on Feb. 8, 2018, while returning from a friend’s wedding. He was charged with “belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood” and “promoting terrorist ideology.”
On May 29, 2022, the Emergency State Security Court sentenced presidential hopeful and Strong Egypt Party leader Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh to 15 years in prison, and El-Qassas to 10 years, in a non-appealable verdict under Case No. 1059/2021.
EIPR confirmed that El-Qassas had spent four and a half years in pretrial detention before the case went to trial, during which he was investigated under four separate cases.
Each time a release order was issued, it went unenforced. Instead, he was rotated to a new, almost identical case, keeping him in continuous detention.
