US awards Boeing $426m contract to produce Chinook helicopters for Egypt

The US has awarded Boeing a $426 million contract to produce 12 CH-47F helicopters for the Egyptian Air Force as part of a major arms deal announced by the American administration last year.

The announcement comes just months after Amnesty International said that Egypt is in the throes of a human rights crisis.

Thousands of people are arbitrarily detained or unjustly prosecuted, dozens have died in prison due to the deliberate denial of medical care and prisoners are held in cruel and inhuman conditions.

According to a recent report by the rights watchdog, the government has censored hundreds of websites, closed independent media websites and detained journalists.

In January 2022, the Biden administration was heavily criticised after approving a $2.5 billion arms sale to Egypt as videos spread online showing prisoners being tortured in a police station in Cairo.

Just days after it approved the arms sale the US cancelled $130 million of foreign military financing on the grounds that Egypt had not met the conditions to receive it.

READ: Egypt man who strangled his fiancée sentenced to death

In May of the same year several Democrats attempted to block the $2.5 million deal on the grounds that the US should not be selling arms to countries with poor human rights records. But the US Senate backed the sale and voted against the attempt to block it.

The year before that the US approved a $200 million arms sale to Egypt, its “strategic partner in the Middle East,” not long after police officers raised the home of family members of the former political prisoner Mohamed Soltan and detained two of his cousins.

Egypt is one of the top ten importers of arms worldwide. Between 2010 and 2022, Cairo bought $22 billion worth of arms.

The EU has increased arms sales to Egypt since the 2013 coup, exporting or licensing at least $12.4 billion worth of arms to Cairo between 2013 and 2020.

In particular, French and German weapons sales to Egypt have surged, with Paris topping the list of arms exporters to Cairo in 2021 at 11.7 billion euros ($12.4 billion).

Between 2013 and 2017 German weapons sales to Egypt surged by 205 per cent. In 2021 Germany sold Egypt $4.6 billion of arms.

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