Activist Hassan Mostafa was referred to an Egyptian criminal court on charges of encouraging activists to block Egypt's railway and help suspects evade arrest by police, the Cairo-based Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights stated on Tuesday.
Last November, several activists in Alexandria blocked the Alexandria-Cairo railway line to protest a train crash in the Upper Egyptian city of Assiut – which left 50 children dead – and demand justice for the victims.
Train services in Egypt's Nile Delta were halted for almost 40 minutes as a result.
Activists gathered at Assiut governorate headquarters to demand the resignation of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated governor, Yehia Keshk.
Mostafa was arrested on 21 January after attempting to file a complaint with Alexandria's prosecutor-general regarding the absence of legal representation for dozens of people arrested during a protest held the previous day.
Mostafa was charged with physically attacking and verbally abusing a prosecutor while filing his complaint. Prosecutors in Alexandria's Sidi Gaber district subsequently referred Mostafa to a criminal court.
According to activist Mahinour El-Masry, a member of the campaign to free him and a witness to his arrest, the charges against the activist were fabricated.
"The ruling regime is acquitting Mubarak-era figures while detaining political activists," El-Masry said in a 12 April television interview.
Egypt's ousted president Hosni Mubarak is currently being retried on charges of complicity in the killing of unarmed anti-regime protesters during the 18-day Tahrir Square uprising in early 2011. Last June, Mubarak received a lifetime prison sentence, but later appealed the verdict.
Mostafa was detained twice during the Mubarak era. He was accused of assaulting a policeman during a 2010 protest against police brutality; he was also arrested in a seminal workers' demonstration in 2008 in the industrial Nile Delta city of Mahalla.
