20years old Egyptian teenager imprisoned for protesting has been released

An Egyptian man, 20 year old, Mahmoud Hussein who was imprisoned for more than two years for challenging the government-sanctioned torture in Egypt was released on bail early Friday morning.

Hussein was arrested when he was 18 in 2014 after being stopped at a checkpoint on his way home from a peaceful protest commemorating the third anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, which ousted longtime President Hosni Mubarak. At the time Hussein was arrested, he wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Nation Without Torture” and a protest scarf.

Egyptian authorities arrested him and put him in a pre-trial detention on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist group and attending an unauthorized protest, among other charges. While in detention, he allegedly admitted to many other charges but Human rights advocates that have been campaigning for his release said he was tortured into making those false confessions.

Nadine Haddad, the Egypt campaigner at Amnesty International, who had been campaigning heavily for Hussein's release said:

“The fact that the authorities arrested him in the first place, tortured him, tried to get him to falsely confess to these crimes and kept him in detention for so long despite growing public pressure to release him,” McMullen said in an interview, “just shows the lengths to which the Egyptian government is willing to go to silence any form of dissent, whether it be a journalist or a young activist.”

She added that:

“There are at least 700 people being held in just two cases on pretrial detention,” Haddad said in an interview with Yahoo News. “We obviously decided to work on the case because it was such a clear-cut case of injustice. It highlighted the flaws in the criminal justice system in Egypt.”

Source: Yahoo News