![]() He was released after being sternly warned not to associate with Islamists in future. I insisted I wasn’t a Salafi.”Ītef’s only crime was that he had befriended a Salafi Islamist and performed Friday prayers at a mosque frequented by Islamist groups. The interrogator repeatedly asked where I hang out, who I associate with and who had converted me to Salafism. ![]() “Luckily I wasn’t tortured myself, although I was threatened with electrocution if I lied. His voice falters and his eyes swell up with tears as he recounts the painful story of his detention. ![]() Every day I would wake up to the cries of people – who were apparently being tortured – begging for mercy. “I spent the next 35 days in a tiny, dark prison cell. He tells CNN he was blindfolded, shoved into the back of a stuffy police van and taken to State Security Headquarters in Nasr City. At the time, Atef had just graduated from Cairo University’s Faculty of Medicine. ![]() In fact, his whereabouts were unknown to his family for more than four weeks, and his frantic parents could do nothing but search for him in prisons across the country. But Atef did not return home that day nor the next. The men who arrested him told his shocked parents that they were taking him to be investigated and would bring him back shortly. Ahmed Atef, 32, recalls a day in the summer of 2004 when he was abducted from his family’s upper-class suburban home in Cairo in a predawn raid by President Hosni Mubarak’s security forces. ![]()
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