Police have arrested 26 Internet activists in the port of Alexandria, and 14 of them were jailed for more than two weeks for “threatening national security,” a security official said on Thursday.
Around 30 young Egyptians who belong to the so-called “April 6” group on social networking site Facebook, a group which earlier this year called for a day of protests at rising prices, gathered in Alexandria on Wednesday.
“We were heading for Sidi Beshr beach, but a policeman prevented us getting there because we had a large kite painted with the Egyptian flag and we were wearing T-shirts with ‘April 6 Movement’ on,” Mohammed Abdel Aziz said.
He said that in the evening the group was walking along the seafront singing nationalist songs when police arrived and arrested 14 of them, he said.
The official confirmed the arrests and said another 12 were detained on Thursday.
The first 14 arrested have been jailed for 15 days under emergency laws for “threatening public security,” the official said, while the others are still being questioned.
The arrests “indicate the security agencies are targeting 35 young men and women who are members of the April 6 group and all attending a trip arranged by the group,” the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said in a statement.
ANHRI tried to contact those detained “but all their mobile phones are turned off, which raises concerns, especially with the well-known practice of torture,” it said.
Esra Abdel Fattah, the 27-year-old woman who set up the April 6 group in March calling for protests against price hikes, was detained at the time but freed after her mother made an appeal to Egyptian Interior Minister Habib al-Adli. Egyptian police took her from a Cairo coffee shop a week before the planned day of action.
Meanwhile, the publisher of a book critical of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime says the book has been banned in Egypt.
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan says in a statement that government censors banned the book Inside Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution by John Bradley.
There was no immediate comment from the government.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
RSS