Egypt denies collective punishment ‘rumours’

Egypt’s Interior Ministry denied on Saturday “rumours” about the “collective punishment” of opposition detainees held in the notorious Scorpion Prison, the state-owned news agency MENA has reported.

“Such claims are baseless and banned Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters seek to spread such rumours to destabilise public opinion,” said a ministry official, who spoke to MENA on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

Despite repeated reports by international rights groups about the torture and mistreatment of prisoners, the Egyptian authorities have also repeatedly denied the claims. On Thursday, for example, Human Rights Watch said in a report that Egyptian security agencies “almost completely deprive inmates of adequate ventilation, electricity and hot water.”

According to HRW, the Scorpion Prison currently holds between 700 and 800 prisoners. There has been a ban on family visits since March 2018 and, since early 2019, prisoners have been deprived of exercise hours, being confined to their cells for 24 hours every day.

READ: No matter what else he claims, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi is a tyrant 

“The Egyptian authorities are apparently imposing collective punishment on hundreds of inmates in Scorpion Prison, after cutting them off from the world for almost three years,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Conditions in this prison are utterly incompatible with the rights of prisoners.”

HRW’s report also quoted a former Scorpion warden saying in an interview in 2012 that the prison “was designed so that those who go in don’t come out again unless dead. It was designed for political prisoners.”

Since the military takeover in 2013, the Egyptian authorities, said HRW, have used it to incarcerate many leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as other high-profile political prisoners.