The Egyptian political prisoner and researcher, Ahmed Samir Santawi, has declared an open-ended hunger strike in protest against the human rights violations in Tora Liman Prison.
Santawi’s decision came a few days after a police officer, known as Ahmed al-Wakeel, brutally assaulted him along with a number of prisoners of conscience, including the journalist Hisham Fouad, the activist Ahmed Doma, and others.
According to well-informed sources in Tora prison, the officer violently attacked the prisoners and moved Doma and Fouad to solitary confinement.
Santawi, had earlier waged a hunger strike on June 28, a week after being sentenced to four years in prison and fined 500 pounds in the Case No. 774 of 2021 on a charge of posing false news on social media, a charge strongly denied by Santawi.
Santawi is a 31-year-old researcher at the Central European University (CEU) in Austria. He was arrested on February 1, 2021, upon his arrival to Egypt.
Since the 2013 military coup, the Egyptian authorities have been waging an unprecedented crackdown on dissidents and critics, arresting thousands in politically motivated arrests, many of whom have been forcibly disappeared or held without trial for years on baseless terrorism-related charges, in very poor detention conditions.
