Egyptian authorities accused of torturing cartoonist Ashraf Omar during enforced disappearance

As the "International Day for the Victims of Enforced Disappearance" nears, detained Egyptian satirical cartoonist Ashraf Omar had reportedly been subjected to torture for long periods of time before his whereabouts were disclosed to his lawyers and family earlier last month.  

During the renewal session of his detention held on Sunday via video conference, Omar's defence team demanded that their client be legally considered a victim of torture because the security forces had allegedly abused him while he was blindfolded.   

"As per the official documents, the time of Ashraf's arrest was 24 July, but he was actually taken from our home on the outskirts of Giza province almost 60 hours earlier. This period was unaccounted for officially," his wife, Nada Mougheeth, told The New Arab on Wednesday.

"He could hardly inform his lawyers that he was severely beaten up and threatened to be tortured by electrical shocks while being blindfolded all this time…the security forces made sure to hit him in parts of his body that could exhibit no signs of torture," she sighed. 

"I have been extremely stressed out and tense; and I told some news outlets that he was electrocuted in detention, which hasn’t been confirmed yet. But I feel deep down he has," the distressed wife noted, adding that the only phrase he could tell her as he was quickly taken to prison by a police truck was one asking her to look after his sick father.

Omar's lawyers, who have illegally been denied access to meet him privately, have asked the prosecution to order a forensic examination of his body to prove the allegations of torture.

The lawyers further demanded that the criminal laboratory officially investigate the footage taken by surveillance cameras in and around the building to identify the exact time when Omar was detained.

The defence team also called for investigating the confiscation of a total of 339,000 Egyptian pounds (about US$ 6,890) owned by the couple, of which only 80,000 EGP were officially accounted for.

"These were my and Ashraf's joint savings from our freelance work that we kept at home," said Mougheeth, who works as a Chinese translator and university lecturer.       

Omar, 38, has been accused of the same set of charges facing regime critics and journalists over the past decades: "being involved in a terrorist group, disseminating false news and misusing social media tools," and remanded in custody, pending further investigations.

Over the past two weeks, Omar's name has been trending on social media, while his controversial cartoons that criticise socioeconomic mismanagement and the alleged corruption in Egypt have been widely shared online.

In a cartoon published on Al-Manassa news outlets, one of the few remaining independent platforms in Egypt, Omar depicts a government official as a thief offering a map of Egypt to a man dressed in a traditional Gulf outfit holding a shopping cart—a reference to state assets sales to wealthy Gulf nations.

Omar is among more than 20 Egyptian journalists currently behind bars, many of them without trial, in a country ranked in 2021 as "the world's third-worst jailer of journalists."

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has been running the country with an iron fist since he took office following a military coup in 2013. Media freedom and civil rights have sharply deteriorated since then.

In April last year, the Egyptian security authorities listed 33 journalists on a new "terrorism" watch list among 82 people, including activists, politicians, and human rights defenders, all living in self-exile outside the country.

Some 600 local and international news sites have also been blocked in Egypt, including Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, the Arabic-language sister publication to TNA.