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.
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