None of this is unusual.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi’s government has, since late 2013, arrested and prosecuted tens of thousands of peaceful critics, journalists, academics and human rights defenders in an “assembly line” of serious abuse. But Mahsoob was not targeted for any political involvement. She was apparently arrested only because she is the sister of Mohamed Mahsoob, the legal and parliamentary affairs minister under former President Mohamed Morsi, and a leader of the moderate al-Wasat Party. He is now based in Paris, fleeing persecution in Egypt after the military ousted Morsi in July 2013.
Mahsoob’s arrest is part of broader thuggish tactics against families of critics and opponents who now live abroad. This has been escalating in recent years. There have been dozens of home raids, arrests and travel bans targeting relatives in Egypt who are not involved with politics.
Egypt Arrests Dissidents Families Under Allies Noses | Opinion Amr Magdi
, Middle East and North Africa researcher, Human Rights Watch On 3/3/21 at 7:30 AM EST
In November 2019, Hasiba Mahsoob, a 50-year-old Egyptian businesswoman, was arrested in public by security forces in Alexandria, Egypt. They took her to an undisclosed location, probably one of the National Security Agency s illegal detention sites, where they routinely disappear dissidents.
Her whereabouts weren t revealed until 67 days later, on January 27, 2020, when her captors finally took her before a prosecutor. Prosecutors, as usual, did not investigate her forced disappearance and ordered her detained pending investigation, rubber-stamping unsupported security allegations that she was a member of an unnamed terrorist group.
March 2, 2021 at 10:49 am
The political division in modern Egypt is nothing new. It has its roots in the national movement which grew from the 1919 revolution, or even before it. The division intensified between the National Party founded by Mustafa Kamel and the Wafd Party, in terms of the methodology used to confront the British occupation and interaction with the political process, to the point where students affiliated with the National Party attempted to assassinate Wafd leader Saad Zaghloul, an incident that he did not discuss in his memoirs. It was possibly among their 100 missing pages.
Nevertheless, that attempt tells us that the use of assassination as a political tool was not invented by the Islamists, as the Sisi regime in Egypt has claimed. It preceded the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, as the National Party used it to try to liquidate British officers, as well as national leaders such as Zaghloul. Among the political groups exiled during the period of the Briti