Stay informed
Where Do the Disappeared Go?
هذه المقالة متوفرة أيضاً باللغة العربية
This story contains details of abuse and rights violations that some readers may find disturbing.
Recently, an Egyptian journalist colleague living in exile in Europe told me that security forces back home had forcibly disappeared his brother. He said he didn’t want to go public with the case because his lawyer was trying to mediate with security agencies to secure his brother’s release. I advised him to do the opposite—to broadcast the news of the disappearance immediately. It would be a risk: officials might fabricate a case against his brother and send him to prison. But that would still be better than disappearance.
My advice was grounded not only in my knowledge of Egypt’s security apparatus but also in my own experience of an enforced disappearance. In February 2018, security officials abducted me from the street after spying on my phone. They had targeted me because of my work as a journalist, and I was disappeared for just under two weeks. During that time, all I could think about was that my family needed to know where I was. The only thing that mattered was getting out of that underground cell.
There is nothing more dangerous than an enforced disappearance. Think about the word for a moment: disappearance. Imagine waking up to find that a relative has vanished without a trace, or that you’ve been torn away from your family with no explanation. When you’re disappeared, anything can happen to you, from verbal humiliation to physical torture or even death. More chillingly, those usually responsible for the disappearance—so-called security services—are also ostensibly responsible for civilians’ protection.
The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted by the United Nations and in force since 2010, defines “enforced disappearance” as any form of deprivation of liberty carried out by the state, or by groups it supports, during which the state denies responsibility, placing its victims outside the protection of the law. Egypt has yet to ratify it.
Enforced disappearance is a global phenomenon, not restricted to Egypt. Security agencies use it systematically to suppress political dissent and target activists and journalists in authoritarian states such as Iran. It’s widespread in countries experiencing conflict and armed struggle, including Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Russia, and Ukraine, and among organized-crime groups in Latin America and Mexico. In 2023, Mexico recorded more than 12,000 such disappearances. An Amnesty International report noted that, around the world, 114,004 people were registered as missing or disappeared between 1962 and 2023.
In Egypt, despite the practice being so widespread, it’s rarely spoken of publicly. Families of the disappeared tend to comply with the regime, including by keeping quiet—an understandable instinct given their fear and attempts to save their loved ones. But compliance does not prevent additional crimes. In my view, delaying the announcement of a disappearance or concealing it entirely often encourages perpetrators to escalate their violations. Those who engage in the torture and extrajudicial killings of the disappeared fear reputational harm if found out.
Economist and researcher Ayman Hadhoud was disappeared in the first week of February 2022. His family kept the matter secret, hoping for his release following mediation by politician Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, head of the Reform and Development Party. Hadhoud died while detained on March 5 of the same year, yet authorities informed his family only on April 9, more than a month later. His brother Omar Hadhoud told reporters at the time that Ayman’s skull was fractured.
There are no official statistics on enforced disappearances in Egypt. Criminal justice researcher Sara Mohamed, coordinator of the Stop Enforced Disappearance campaign, says her group, one of several working under dangerous conditions to produce estimates, has documented at least 5,000 disappearances in Egypt since 2013. She stresses that the number is likely an undercount. According to the UN, 300 enforced disappearances were documented in Egypt in 2022 alone. During the country’s 2025 Universal Periodic Review, 137 states expressed concern over the deterioration of human rights and recommended ratifying the UN convention and creating an independent body to investigate disappearances.
In the absence of solid statistics, individual stories of the forcibly disappeared paint a clear and horrifying picture. Victims are taken to a secret location and subjected to multiple forms of psychological and physical torture: verbal abuse, punching, kicking, beating, electric shocks, simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, psychological manipulation. They are typically handcuffed or shackled to walls, blindfolded, denied proper food, and barred from bathing and basic hygiene. Depending on the length and severity of their detention and their individual resilience, these conditions can lead to skin diseases, permanent physical disabilities, memory loss or mental illness, or death under torture. All of these outcomes have been documented.
While enforced disappearances have expanded and intensified under the current regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took power in a bloody military coup in 2013, the practice predates his rule. Under the thirty-year reign of late president Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in the January 2011 revolution, one of the most prominent cases of enforced disappearance was that of journalist Reda Helal, who was taken in 2003. After the 2011 revolution, Mohamed el-Baz—a pro-regime journalist during the Mubarak era who now backs el-Sisi—said on his show that Helal had been killed and his body dissolved in quicklime.
El-Baz recently ignited public demand for greater transparency from the government around the forcibly disappeared. Appearing on a talk show in January, he claimed he had information about former opposition member of parliament Mostafa el-Naggar, a leading figure in the January 2011 revolution, who disappeared in September 2018. According to el-Baz, el-Naggar was killed by smugglers at the border with Sudan. The case has been dogged by conspiracy and contradictory narratives as the government has denied any involvement and at times has accused el-Naggar of going into hiding to avoid serving a criminal sentence.
El-Naggar’s family has rejected these claims. In January 2020, they obtained a court ruling that required the Egyptian Ministry of Interior to inform el-Naggar’s wife of his whereabouts. His family have also called for a formal inquiry into his disappearance. The government has yet to respond.
Under the current regime, even children can be targeted. Belady an Island for Humanity, a human rights organization focused on protecting imprisoned women and children, documented the disappearance of Abdullah Boumedine, a twelve-year-old arrested in December 2017. A lawyer from the foundation (who asked not to be named) says Boumedine was forcibly disappeared for six months and tortured. The lawyer says Boumedine’s father and older brother were reportedly killed in armed clashes with the Egyptian army and counterterrorism forces after joining extremist jihadist groups in North Sinai. After appearing before prosecution, at which point he was no longer considered disappeared, the boy was held in solitary confinement and denied visits until an order was issued for his release in December 2018. Release procedures dragged on until mid-January 2019, when the police station called his sister to pick him up. She signed papers confirming receipt of her brother. Just before leaving the station, Boumedine was re-arrested and disappeared again. There hasn’t been news of him ever since.
But the case that has drawn the most international attention is that of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni, who was abducted in Cairo on January 25, 2016. His body was found nine days later, bearing signs of torture.
Egyptian authorities, who suspected him of political activity related to his research on independent labour unions in the country, are widely believed to be responsible for his torture and killing. The government denied involvement and later had five Egyptian men shot, claiming they were connected to Regeni’s death. That claim was later disproven when Italian prosecutors ordered the trial of four Egyptian security officers implicated in Regeni’s torture and killing.
While addressing the Italian parliament, Regeni’s mother, Paola, said she saw “all the world’s evil” poured onto her son’s face. “They tortured and killed him as if he were Egyptian.”
A question has long occupied my mind: Can a person return from death? Not biological but legal and symbolic death, produced by prolonged disappearance.
Human rights lawyer Mahienour el-Massry says that under Egyptian law, a missing person who’s “presumed dead is declared deceased after four years from the date of disappearance.”
Another human rights lawyer, M. E.—he preferred to go by his initials for safety reasons—says that since January 2023, dozens of people who had been disappeared for four or five years have suddenly reappeared before the State Security Prosecution, after their families had lost hope. He recalls contacting some families to inform them their relatives had resurfaced, only to be met with disbelief. Over the years, many families had fallen victim to fraudsters claiming to have information about their disappeared relatives.
In the two years immediately following the 2011 revolution, some of those who had gone missing under Mubarak began to reappear.
This past June, forty-seven disappeared people, including women, returned after having been gone five years, renewing hope among many families of the disappeared in Egypt. There are no clear explanations or credible theories for why these people, or others, appear when they do. Sometimes the decision to release them seems completely random; individuals may be “forgotten” in secret facilities until an officer decides, years later, to send them to the Supreme State Security Prosecution on trumped-up charges.
Just over a year ago, hope surged for thousands of families across the region. After the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, opposition groups released more than 24,000 disappeared detainees from al-Assad-run detention centres—only a fraction of the total, which the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates to be at least 181,000 missing people. When Saydnaya Military Prison near the capital was opened, detainees and disappeared people were freed, and testimonies of abduction, torture, and killing poured out. Some had been imprisoned for decades. Lebanese detainee Suhail Hamawi had been abducted by Syrian intelligence from Lebanon thirty-two years earlier, spending his first years in Saydnaya before being transferred to other facilities. He emerged only in 2024. Another detainee, arrested in 2015, was found alive but mentally disoriented.
Saydnaya Prison in Syria (Mohammad Bash/Alamy)Syrian detainee Ali Mustafa, known as Abu Samid, was arrested in July 2013. His wife and three daughters left Syria immediately. “This was the agreement: the moment he was arrested, we fled the country,” says his daughter Ghina, now living in Toronto. “Al-Assad [used] families as a tool of torture.”
After al-Assad’s fall, Abu Samid’s daughters returned to Syria to search for clues as to his whereabouts in security branches. Twelve years after his disappearance, the daughters found evidence he had been there: messages their father had written on the wall of his cell in 2013. “Good morning, Ghina,” “I swear I love you . . . forgive me.”
“He doesn’t know we don’t need to forgive him,” says Ghina. “We’re proud of him and what he did.”
She describes enforced disappearance as deliberate, slow torture, not only for the detainee but also for everyone around him. “You don’t even have the right to grieve or hold a funeral. If he has died, there is no evidence, no grave to visit. We’ve been searching for twelve years. If there were a way to sell our hearts just to get a piece of information, we would.”
But Ghina refuses to lose hope. “I feel his spirit. I believe he exists. I won’t accept what people say.”
During my own enforced disappearance in February 2018, I was handcuffed and blindfolded and taken to a secret facility inside a Central Security Forces camp in what’s known as 6th of October City, part of Greater Cairo. The site held between sixty and eighty disappeared people. We were stripped of our names and assigned numbers instead, based on who had been there the longest, with Number One being the longest-held detainee. For nearly two weeks, I was denied my name, all my rights, my humanity, my existence.
I was held in solitary confinement in a cell beside where the security officers conducted their operations. I could hear phone calls between officers, track the arrival of new detainees, and see others taken away, either home, to official prisons, or for an extrajudicial execution. I witnessed an average of ten new disappeared people arrive daily.
This wasn’t the only site where disappeared people were kept. Egypt is divided into twenty-seven governorates, each with at least one facility used for enforced disappearance. These are run by the National Security Agency, which is responsible for internal political security. Additional sites are run by the departments of general intelligence and military intelligence. Many believe that practically all police stations also function as illegal detention sites. Some have rooms known as “the refrigerator,” where disappeared people are kept until officers decide whether to release them, press freshly fabricated charges against them, or simply leave them as they are.
When I finally appeared before the prosecution, it felt as though I had come back from the dead. I regained my name, my existence, some of my humanity and rights. Then I entered a different, slightly less brutal form of death: political imprisonment. I remained in prison for the next three and a half years. I summed up my feelings in my first Facebook post after my release: “Now . . . now . . . now . . . I breathe.”
In September 2019, protests against el-Sisi led to mass arrests, with around 500 detainees brought before prosecutors on the first day alone. During that period, the disappearance facility in 6th of October City held more than 200 disappeared people—more than twice its capacity—according to the testimonies of detainees who were there at the time and whom I met in prison in 2020. (The nature of disappearance facilities makes it nearly impossible to verify this figure with officials.)
Recently, I tried to find this facility on Google Maps. I was suddenly curious to know what it looked like from the outside. Finding the detention centre was not a matter of simply searching for it on Google, as such facilities are illegal and have no official names. I spent several hours piecing together clues that I could trace through satellite imagery to identify the centre’s location. I knew, for instance, that it was part of a security forces training centre in 6th of October City, and I later recalled that it was close to one of the capital’s Ring Road exits.
Based on that, I followed the Ring Road on the map and examined the areas surrounding its exits until I eventually pinpointed the location. And I was shocked to discover its aerial architecture resembles a miniature version of Syria’s Saydnaya prison.
A National Security Agency facility in Greater Cairo. (Google Maps)I began to wonder why the two facilities were architecturally similar. Is there a security rationale behind such a design? Is there some form of coordination between both regimes? Are there other prisons in the world built along the same pattern? I started searching for images of other Egyptian detention and disappearance sites via satellite but failed to identify a recurring architectural model.
Still, the congruity between Saydnaya and the facility where I was held raised questions in my mind about how repression can replicate itself. While watching videos of Saydnaya’s released prisoners, some things had felt familiar: the room shapes, the colours, the darkness, the narrow hallways, the wall writings, the filth. I felt as though I could smell the place through the screen.
Urban researcher Ibrahim Ezz el-Din was forcibly disappeared for 167 days beginning in June 2019. He was interrogated about his work with the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, tortured, and coerced into false confessions. After appearing for prosecution, he then spent two and a half years in prison.
While detained, Ezz el-Din tried to keep track of time but eventually lost count. Days turned into weeks, then months. He realized he was being transferred to prosecution when officers allowed him to shave, shower, and change into clean clothes. “It was a confusing state,” he says, “happiness at leaving that place and sadness for others whose fate I did not know and who might remain disappeared for months or years.” Now living in France, he says the psychological damage remains with him to this day: “At some point, someone decided you no longer exist in this world.”
Survivors of enforced disappearances often bear long-term psychological scars, most commonly post-traumatic stress disorder. In Egypt, the El Nadeem Centre specializes in supporting the survivors of torture and violence, but it, too, has faced direct targeting, raids, and closure orders by security forces. (In February, the Supreme State Security Prosecution summoned one of El Nadeem’s co-founders, Aida Seif el-Dawla, for interrogation. According to the news outlet Mada Masr, she was questioned for three hours about a recent report her organization had published on harassment and torture in detention sites.)
Psychiatrist Mona Hamed Imam of the El Nadeem Centre says psychological disorders arising from enforced disappearances are more complex than what standardized medical diagnoses can capture. For example, a person might suffer from insomnia but only at night because they were abducted at night—while still being able to sleep in the daytime if they feel safe. Labelling this simply as insomnia, she says, is inadequate.
She suggests that rather than “recovery” or “healing,” the more accurate term for what survivors do is coping. The wound leaves a permanent mark; the experience is never forgotten. Survivors must learn to live with it. The degree of coping varies widely from one person to another.
Imam believes that the role of the family and loved ones of the disappeared extends beyond support. They must try to understand, walk beside the survivor step by step, and accompany them on the long journey of endurance and rebuilding.
But that can happen only if the disappeared come back. Human rights lawyer Nourhan Hassan of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms found herself searching for two of her brothers. Ahmed Hassan, seventeen at the time, disappeared in April 2019, while Mohamed disappeared in September that same year. Mohamed appeared before the prosecution after three months, but Ahmed remains disappeared after seven years.
As a lawyer herself, Nourhan tried to enforce a court order compelling the interior ministry and the attorney general to reveal her brother’s location, but the authorities allowed her to file only a missing-person report. While she had received some unofficial updates about one of her brothers early on, the trickle of information slowed to a stop. In July 2024, she received a call from the wife of a man who claimed he had been detained with Ahmed. The woman provided personal details to confirm her story, seeking to reassure Nourhan. After that, mysterious individuals began warning Nourhan and her mother not to speak publicly about Ahmed or they would face arrest.
She speaks of a particularly brutal kind of pain: seeing her mother refuse to eat hot food or to sleep in a bed, choosing instead to sleep on the kitchen floor, even during winter, to share what she imagined was her son’s daily reality in a cold cell. Nourhan is terrified of the prospect of going to the morgue to identify a corpse in case it turns out to be her brother.
Nourhan remembers the moment al-Assad’s regime fell and Saydnaya was opened. Her Syrian friend called, crying with hope that news might finally emerge about her own uncle, disappeared two years before Ahmed. For a moment, they both cried with overwhelming hope. But that hope became its own brand of torture when time passed and no new information emerged and thousands in Syria remained missing even after the regime’s collapse. Nourhan and her friend fear that their search might continue for years.
Still, for Nourhan, as long as her brother’s body hasn’t been found, she says, “he is alive.” She insists she feels a “sensory bond” with him: “I know he’s alive. I know he exists. Sometimes when he gets sick, I feel something is wrong [in my body].” She writes messages and Facebook posts for and about Ahmed, in part so that others remember him too. And she records voice messages regularly for her brother, telling him about important events and daily life so he can listen to them when he returns.
The post Where Do the Disappeared Go? first appeared on The Walrus.
Unpublished Newswire
Comments
Be the first to comment