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Egypt

Rights groups call for end of torture for detainees

Human rights group Amnesty International has called on the Egyptian military to stop the use of torture and ill treatment of detainees, amid new evidence of abuse. Former detainees have come forward to speak of torture by electric shock as well as being whipped. The group has spoken to those who were detained during the last days of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
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Amnesty said that recently released detainees told their researchers that members of the armed forces beat and whipped detainees in order to get information from them.

02:43

Sally Sami, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies

Daniel Finnan in Cairo

Sally Sami, from the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies says that her organisation continues to receive reports about hundreds of bodies in hospitals.

And she says there are a number of people who have disappeared, and their families cannot find them.

This is due to confusion over which branch of the government could detain who when protests began on 25 January, says Sami.

People were being arrested by military police officers, by police officers, state security officers, thugs and civilian militias, she says.

"I call them militia because they are obviously functioning under state orders, " she adds.

"One person was telling me that there was fight between the state security officer and the military officer over who has the authority to take them. In this instance, they were taken by the military police and were treated better, but the question is, what about those who were taken by state security? Who was in power? Who had the authority to hold the people?"

Sami says that a comprehensive, official list of the dead and the detained needs to be released.

"It is making it very difficult for the families of the disappeared and those who have been killed to actually know the whereabouts of their loved ones," said Sami.

This is the obligation of the state, she says, but she is worried that no one has come forward with more concrete information on the dead and the detained.

"It's scandalous, it's scary. The well-being and safety of these people is a responsibility of the state regardless of who is ruling it now."

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