Both El Nadeem Center against Torture and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights warned of the deterioration of the health of Islam Muhammad Abd al-Hamid Orabi, who was imprisoned despite the issuance of a decision to release him on February 16, 2021 on bail that was paid as soon as the decision was issued. The two organizations said that Orabi suffers from intestinal obstruction symptoms that required calling an ambulance twice during his detention in Shubra El-Kheima Section Two, which is an emergency medical condition that requires urgent surgical intervention to avoid serious complications that pose a threat to his life.

On December 26, 2020, Islam Orabi - who is newly married and whose wife is four months pregnant - received a phone call from one of the police secretaries working for the National Security Agency summoning him to the Shubra al-Khaimah branch. Immediately after the call, Islam went to the headquarters of the agency and was forcibly disappeared for a week, then appeared before the Shubra al-Khaimah Prosecution Office and was interrogated as a defendant in Shubra al-Khaimah II misdemeanor Case No. 162 of 2020.

His imprisonment was renewed until a decision was issued to release him on February 16, 2021, with a financial guarantee of three thousand pounds, which was paid. But Islam remained unlawfully detained in the Shubra al-Khaima police station II, where his wife brought him food without being allowed to see him.  Yesterday, March 6th, the police secretaries told her that her husband was no longer held in the department and that they did not know where he was taken.

As part of his family’s attempts to follow up on the implementation of the prosecution’s decision and to find out who is detaining Islam, the wife’s lawyer, Mr. Reda Marei from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, on Wednesday, March 3rd, sent an appeal to the National Council for Human Rights to intervene to secure his release and to provide him with the necessary medical care. On the same day, El Nadeem Center Against Torture sent another appeal to Professor Salah Salam, a member of the National Council for Human Rights, with a warning that Islam Orabi's condition may lead to gangrene in the intestine, especially since he had performed an operation for the same conditions twice previously, the most recent of which was in July 2020.

The continued detention of Islam Orabi despite obtaining a decision to release him and having paid his bail constitutes a crime of unlawful detention, and is punishable under Article 280 of the Penal Code which states: “Any person who arrests, jails or detains a person without order by the relevant authorities and in other than the cases in which laws and regulations authorize the arrest of suspects, he shall be punished with detention or a fine not exceeding two hundred pounds”. Orabi’s disappearance from the police department increases fears about his safety and the possibility of deterioration of his health, which may constitute a danger to his life.

• Egyptian Initiative for Personal rights
• El Nadeem Center against torture