Inmates receiving medical treatment at the clinic of Borg el-Arab prison near Alexandria, Egypt, November 20, 2019.
(Beirut) – Egyptian authorities are denying medical care to a death row prisoner with an apparent brain tumor, following a forced disappearance and an unfair trial, Human Rights Watch said today.
The Egyptian authorities detained the prisoner, Ahmed al-Waleed al-Shal, in 2014 shortly after he graduated from medical school at age 24. He was convicted in a mass trial for alleged involvement in a violent attack, and sentenced to death following confessions he told prosecutors and his family were obtained through torture, including rape. For over a decade, his family said, he has been held in abysmal conditions and denied appropriate medical care for an apparent mass in his brain. In recent months, his symptoms have drastically worsened.
“The Egyptian authorities have inflicted immense suffering on Ahmed al-Waleed al-Shal and his family by failing to provide him necessary medical care despite an apparent brain tumor,” said Amr Magdi, senior Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Allowing al-Shal immediate surgery and freeing or transferring him on medical grounds, given the years of failure to provide adequate medical care, would be a long-overdue act of justice.”
Al-Shal was convicted in the February 28, 2014, murder of Abdullah al-Metwally, a guard of one of the judges who tried former president Mohammed Morsy after he was removed from office in 2013. The National Security Agency responded with mass arrests, detaining nearly two dozen alleged members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that to which Morsy belonged. Al-Shal’s mother, Nouseila Haroun, told Human Rights Watch that authorities arrested him on March 6, 2014, outside his university and forcibly disappeared him, ignoring inquiries about his wherea
