Egyptian opposition figure Yahya Abdelhadi was detained for questioning on Wednesday (31/7), according to prominent lawyer Khaled Ali, two years after he received a presidential pardon.
Ali was informed by authorities on Wednesday evening that Abdelhadi had been taken to the state security prosecutor's office headquarters “to begin interrogation,” he wrote on Facebook.
The lawyer had previously posted that the veteran opposition figure was taken from his car on a busy Cairo street “by a number of men in civilian clothes” who “kidnapped him to an unknown location.”
Abdelhadi was one of the first dissidents to be pardoned in 2022, when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi reactivated the presidential pardon committee, in what was hailed as a new beginning for Egypt's maligned human rights record.
He was released in June, after three years in prison on charges of “spreading false news,” although he was only sentenced a few weeks before his release.
Abdelhadi, a critic of Sisi's government, had been a key figure in the Kefaya (Enough!) movement, which helped topple the previous autocrat, Hosni Mubarak, in 2011.
The government has relaunched a “national dialogue” since 2022 and released hundreds of political prisoners, but human rights groups say at least three times as many have been arrested during the same period.
Human rights activists estimate that Cairo still holds tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of them in brutal conditions. (ns/ab)
