detention" for allegedly "insulting Islam" by becoming a Christian. Egypt’s secret police transferred Bahaa el-Din Ahmed Hussein el-Akkad, 57, to the Wadi el-Natroun Prison last month and refused to set him free, despite a court order, news reports said.
In published remarks, his defense team said he was told he would remain there indefinitely unless he agreed to work as a government informer against other converts to Christianity.
El-Akkad was imprisoned without charges for over a year after officials of the State Security Investigation (SSI) arrested him in Cairo on April 6, 2005, Christians said.
SEVERAL INTERROGATIONS
Despite reported interrogations, the former Muslim was apparently never told the specific accusations against him. Several of his cellmates spread rumors that he was converting and baptizing people into Christianity, sparking verbal abuse and at least one severe beating from a fellow prisoner, Compass Direct News agency reported.
According to the prisoner’s Cairo attorney, Athanasius William, his client remains incarcerated in this desert prison "only because he has chosen a different belief, to be a Christian."
When courts ordered El-Akkad’s release from provisional detention 10 weeks ago, SSI authorities deliberately ignored the ruling, Compass Direct News said. They reportedly held him in their Gaber Ibn Hayyan office in Giza and then transferred him to the Wadi el-Natroun Prison, located 96 kilometers (60 miles) north of the capital Cairo along the highway to Alexandria.
In a series of handwritten notes smuggled out of prison in recent months, El-Akkad declared that he had "chosen the Christian faith" after years of research on Islam.
FUNDAMENTALIST GROUPS
For over 20 years, the former sheikh was a member of the fundamentalist Islamic group Tabligh and Da’wa, which actively proselytized non-Muslims but strictly opposed violence. He also led a mosque community in Al-Haram, in the Giza area adjacent to Cairo. In 1994 he had published, Islam: the Religion, a 500-page book reviewing the traditional beliefs of the Islamic faith.
But he became disillusioned, and five years ago the sheikh said he began to pray that he could somehow know God personally. It was not until January 2005 that he talked for the first time with someone who explained the tenets of the Christian faith to him. He began intensive study of Christian Scripture, and within weeks he became a follower of Jesus Christ, Compass Direct News said.
"This is a proof to all Muslims," El-Akkad reportedly wrote, "that the person who studies the two religions from an objective "and serious perspective will choose the Christian approach."
El-Akkad’s conversion to Christianity soon reached the SSI, and secret police picked him up without warning from his private trade office. After six weeks in SSI detention, El-Akkad was sent to Cairo’s Tora Mazraa Prison.
BLASPHEMY CHARGE
When his lawyer, William, finally obtained power of attorney to visit the convert, he was reportedly told he was incarcerated under emergency law provisions on suspicion of "committing blasphemy against Islam."
For one year, El-Akkad’s detention was renewed every 45 days under emergency law provisions, even though he still had not been formally charged. In July, authorities instituted a new law restricting provisional detention regulations, specifying that the length of provisional detention for a misdemeanor should not, "whatever the circumstances," exceed six months.
El-Akkad was accused of "insulting a heavenly religion," a misdemeanor under Article 98-F of the Egyptian penal code, so a Cairo court ordered him released on July 30.
After learning of the court-ordered release, El-Akkad’s wife and three children waited in vain for him to return home. Ten days later, William finally confirmed that although the convert had been released from prison, he remained in SSI custody in Giza.
HEALTH CONCERNS
The lawyer said he was concerned about his client’s health as by mid-September, authorities transferred El-Akkad to the maximum security Wadi el-Natroun Prison, where the majority of Egyptian Islamists sentenced for anti-government activities are incarcerated.
Notorious for its Spartan conditions in the desert, the prison facility houses its prisoners in small cells measuring one by two meters. William said his client is in weak health from prison, suffering from high blood pressure as well as skin diseases caused by extreme temperatures, unsanitary cell conditions and bites from insects and small reptiles.
"He is locked in a place where he may die because his age, body and mind cannot tolerate this cruelty and stubbornness of the state security authorities," William told Compass Direct News.
The attorney has received no response from a petition he filed to Attorney General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud on September 4 citing serious legal violations in El-Akkad’s case.
Although Egypt’s Christian citizens are free to embrace Islam and obtain legal Muslim identities, Muslim citizens are not allowed to change their religious identity. Christian rights groups and church leaders say those who become Christians are subjected to severe harassment by the SSI, which often reportedly arrests converts for either insulting Islam or "threatening national security."
Egyptian officials have not officially commented on the case. (With reports from Egypt).
