30 Aug 2019; MEMO: On Tuesday 17-year-old Alaa Yasser Farouk told lawyers that whilst detained she heard officers electrocuting her father and then was threatened with torture if she did not confess to joining and funding the Muslim Brotherhood.
In December 2013 the military-backed government in Egypt labelled the Brotherhood a terrorist group after a suicide bomb hit the police headquarters in Mansoura killing 16 people.
The group condemned the attack and accused authorities of exploiting the dead to smear them, however, since then most political prisoners have been accused of funding or being associated with the group whether they are or not.
Alaa and her father Yasser Farouk Ali were forcibly disappeared on 3 August for 24 days and held at the National Security Headquarters before Alaa was brought before the prosecution.
The international rights organisation We Record has documented that the Egyptian regime has forcibly disappeared 396 women since the 3 July 2013 coup.
In July the Cairo-based NGO El-Nadeem said that 492 people have been forcibly disappeared by the regime since the start of this year.
Authorities are putting pressure on the family of opposition members to silence dissenting voices.
In June security forces stormed the house of opposition politician and member of the Istiqlal Party Osama Al-Aqbawi and when they could not find him arrested his daughter, the student Mawadda Osama Al-Aqbawi.
Even when her father handed himself in, they arrested him and refused to release Mawadda, adding her to the list of defendants in the Hope Alliance case.
Since 2013 the regime of coup leader, now President, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has expanded its detention of women and girls, considered a red line by previous administrations.
According to the Egyptian Coordination for Rights and Freedoms at the end of 2017 1,993 women and girls had been arrested, the very same year Al-Sisi announced was the year of Egyptian women.
Many of these were under 18, despite the fact that Egypt has signed up for the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) that calls for freedom from abuse for children.
