Egyptian police 'carried out extra-judicial killing' of opposition activists

Egyptian police have “extra-judicially” killed four opposition activists as they were spending their Eid al-Adha holidays in the seaside city of al-Agami near Alexandria, according to a human rights group.

The Afro-Arab Centre for Freedoms and Human Rights [ACFHR] said the group of four men went missing in mysterious circumstances on 21 September - only to appear again as the ministry of interior announced their deaths.

“Security forces arrived and imposed a security cordon around the tower block and then stormed the apartment and arrested them,” eyewitnesses told the ACFHR.

“More than an hour and a half later, the sound of gunshots was heard inside the apartment where the four had been held. Then, security forces came out carrying four bodies,” they added.

The Egyptian police released a statement on Wednesday that four “Muslim Brotherhood members” were killed in the raid as the group was organising a “terrorist attack” on a police checkpoint in Alexandria.

	Ahmad Gabr was allegedly extra-judicially killed by police [AAAJ]

“Once they became aware of the presence of the [security] forces the terrorists initiated with heavy gun fire, the forces retaliated similarly, resulting in their deaths,” the statement read.

The police accused the men, three of which students, a 2014 assassination of a policeman in the coastal province of Beheira south of Alexandria, where they were from.

In January, however, police arrested and charged three men for the killing of the same policeman in the town of Delengat, Beheira where the incident took place.

Sources told the ACFHR that two friends of the group are currently being held by police in Alexandria and are being subjected to “severe torture”.

The four men killed in the raid were Ammar Abd al-Maguid, 23, Hamada Fath al-Bab, 23, Mohammad al-Amouri, 29, and Mohammad Zaid, 38.

The human rights group said there has been a recent increase in number of cases of extrajudicial executions, since the current Interior Minister Magdi Abd al-Ghaffar took office earlier this year.

In March, police raided the flat of anti-coup activist Ahmad Gabr in Alexandria and killed him front of his children.

Nine senior Brotherhood members were killed after allegedly being arrested in July, following a large scale militant attack in Sinai.

Egypt has been dogged by instability since Egypt's first democratically elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown in a military coup on July 3, 2013.

Since Morsi was ousted, Egyptian authorities have carried out a relentless crackdown on the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, leaving hundreds dead and thousands behind bars.