Egypt refuses to free jailed activist Alaa Abdel Fattah: sister

Egyptian authorities have refused to release dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah despite serving out his five-year sentence, his sister said Sunday.

Abdel Fattah, 42, was arrested on September 29, 2019.

Just over two years later, he was handed a five-year sentence for "spreading false news" by sharing a Facebook post about police brutality.

His family on Thursday urged the government of Britain, where Abdel Fattah holds citizenship, to ensure his release this weekend.

But on Sunday his sister Mona Seif said in a video posted to social media that the authorities "refused a request" to consider the two years of pre-trial detention as time served towards his sentence.

She said the authorities are instead counting his sentence as having started from the date that it was ratified, and has thereby set the date of his release for January 2027.

Seif had told reporters in London on Thursday that "if he is not out by September 29, it is an open-ended sentence".

A writer and computer programmer, Abdel Fattah has spent the better part of more than a decade behind bars, having been jailed repeatedly under successive presidents since Egypt's 2011 uprising.

He was granted UK citizenship through his British-born mother in 2022 while he was in prison.

Rights groups say there are tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt, held under poor conditions and subject to ill treatment and abuses by the authorities.

On Thursday, more than 59 Egyptian and international rights groups signed the appeal, expressing concern at Abdel-Fattah could not be released for years into the future.

In the statement, the groups "expressed their deep alarm at news, shared by his lawyer, that the Egyptian authorities do not plan to release Alaa until January 2027."

The statement did not say how the lawyer obtained this information.

They warned that not releasing Abdel-Fattah on Sunday would violate the country's penal code, which deducts time spent in detention before trial from the total sentence.

Abdel-Fattah and his family have campaigned for his release for years.

In 2022, he intensified a hunger strike in prison and halted all calories and water to coincide with the start of the UN climate conference, known as COP27, in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Concerns for his health intensified as the family was barred from seeing him .

They stepped up their campaign to draw attention to his case and those of other political prisoners in Egypt.

He stopped the strike after a matter of days, after he collapsed and fell unconscious, describing it later in a letter to his family.

The hunger strike drew attention to Egypt’s heavy suppression of speech and political activity.

Since 2013, el-Sissi’s government has cracked down on dissidents and critics, jailing thousands, virtually banning protests and monitoring social media.

Human Rights Watch estimated in 2019 that as many as 60,000 political prisoners are incarcerated in Egyptian prisons.