Egyptian Blogger Who Posted Videos of Police Torture Is Arrested, Released

Feb. 4, 2011 — -- Wael Abbas, a journalist who has posted hundreds of horrifying videos on police abuse on the web says he was arrested and then released by the Egyptian Army on Friday evening.

Abbas tweeted "arrested by the Army!" just before 7 p.m. Cairo time. Someone using the Twitter handle 'RamyYaacoub' tweeted several minutes later that he was on the phone with Abbas and that Abbas said, "Yes, yes, I was arrested, I am with the military police now." RamyYaacoub then tweeted that Abbas had said he was "okay but in their custody" before the call was cut off.

A little over an hour later, Abbas tweeted that he had been released by the Army, but was being "stopped [at] every single checkpoint." He followed with a tweet that read, "We are getting arrested every five minutes now for looking like foreigners and having a camera and a laptop."

On Thursday, Abbas had told ABC News that he was hiding, trying to stay out of the hands of Mubarak supporters and of Egypt's feared security agencies.

"I'm moving around," Wael Abbas told ABC News from an undisclosed location. "I'm trying to get to a safe place. All my friends have been arrested."

Abbas, a journalist in his mid-30s, is well-known in Egypt as the man behind misrdigital.com, a blog that has been posting police torture videos since February 2005. His latest post, on January 26, shows the dead body of a young protestor in a hospital near the Suez Canal. The man has been shot in the abdomen, and a nurse can be heard screaming into a phone that more wounded are being brought to the hospital.

Human rights groups describe a culture of torture within Egypt's police agencies. The U.S. State Department issued a report in 2009 describing torture, and secret U.S. cables released by WikiLeaks also refer to political repression and "persistent, credible" allegations of abuse. But at the same time, the U.S. has more than a billion dollars in aid annually to the Mubarak regime, and since 1995 has had an agreement with Egypt to deliver suspects for interrogation to the country's intelligence service.

Suspects sent to Egypt under the "extraordinary rendition" program, according to human rights groups, were routinely subjected to torture as part of interrogation.

The same groups, however, say that the average Egyptian is more likely to experience day-to-day torture from the police, who are accused of using torture to extract confessions, or State Security Investigations (SSI), the domestic intelligence agency that rounds up political dissidents.

On Thursday, Abbas told ABC News he was worried about retribution for his role in publicizing police abuses. He said he refused to stay on the phone for more than a minute at a time.

"I'm afraid for my life," Abbas told ABC News. "I need to figure out what I'm going to do and where I'm going to go."

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