Attorney Ibrahim Metwaly Hegazy, who represents Giulio Regeni’s family, has been arrested by the Egyptian police. He disappeared last Sunday at Cairo International Airport while he was about to take the plane to Geneva, where he was expected to join the meeting of the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.
While the Egyptian Internal Affairs Ministry hid behind “no comment” and “no information” on the case, the Egyptian Commission on Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) said that its research found that Hegazy had appeared before a Cairo security magistrate under arrest.
At press time, we had no information on formal allegations. But the Egyptian authorities had already blocked the ECRF website, where the NGO had published the latest report on forced disappearances in Egypt. El-Sisi’s government deemed it as “full of slanders.” ECRF had sent Hegazy, whose son disappeared in 2013, to Geneva to speak about Regeni’s murder and the many disappeared Egyptians.