Rights defender and Chairman of the board of local NGO Egyptian Commission of Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) was arrested early Monday and detained for four days on Tuesday on charges that include advocating terrorism using the internet, his lawyer said.
The prosecution will investigate Ahmed Abdullah Wednesday morning, lawyer Doaa Mostafa added.
He was arrested from his home in the fifth settlement, an East Cairo district and was then taken to the New Cairo police station, according to a statement released by 16 local rights groups on Monday.
Abdullah is also the consultant of the legal team of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni's family, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.
The 28-year-old doctoral student, Regeni, went missing in Cairo on Jan. 25, 2015, which marked the fifth anniversary of the popular uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak.
Ten days later, Regeni's body was found, bearing signs of torture, in a roadside ditch on the outskirts of Cairo.
Regeni's family expressed in a statement their "concern over the recent wave of arrests in Egypt (of) human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, some of them directly engaged in the search for the truth about the abduction, torture and murder of Giulio".
ECRF member Mohamed Saeed told Aswat Masriya that there was a previous attempt to arrest Abdullah in January. Moreover, the NGO's executive director Mohamed Lotfy has been banned from travel with no specified reason.
ECRF said that Abdullah faces a long list of charges including inciting the use of force, inciting the assault on police stations for a terrorist purpose, using violence and threats to compel the president to refrain from an action within his prerogatives and tasks under the constitution.
Abdullah is also accused of belonging to a terrorist organization, promoting through the internet ideas advocating terrorist acts in order to mislead the security authorities and inciting demonstrations with the purpose of infringing public order, among others.
In 2015, security forces prevented the publishing of ECRF's human rights magazine on accusations of being affiliated with the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood group, according to former editor-in-chief of the magazine Jehad Rajab.
The magazine was instead published online in its PDF version.
ECRF said it fears Abdullah's arrest was related to the ongoing NGO foreign funding case, in which several human rights activists are involved.
Egypt decided in March to reopen the foreign funding case which dates back to 2011. The case accused several local NGOs of receiving foreign funds illegally. It later on simply came to be known as the NGO trial, in which 43 Egyptians and foreigners were convicted in 2013.
Sixteen local rights groups expressed on Monday their concern over what they described as the "prosecution's tendency to trump up charges under the counterterrorism law, terrorist entities law, protest law, and assembly law, as well as vaguely worded charges under the Penal Code."
Amnesty International released a statement Tuesday regarding the latest arrest and detention of several leading activists and human rights defenders including Abdullah and spokesperson of the Revolutionary Socialist movement Haitham Mohammedein.
Over the past few day, hundreds have been arrested in a security crackdown that preceded calls for protest on Apr. 25 in opposition to a recently signed border demarcation agreement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Egypt's interior ministry tightened security measures on trains and buses and in metro stations on Sunday ahead of planned protests and threatened to respond with "utmost firmness" to any action that disturbs public security.
"It is a very dangerous development that such an adversity exists between the state and human rights activists," Saeed said, "anyone working in the field is subject to this kind of absurd list of charges."
The ECRF is a local rights group based in Giza, dependent on the voluntary work of researchers and lawyers. It monitors human rights violations and provides legal support, carries out documentation, and launches solidarity initiatives and awareness campaigns.
