Leaked videos, obtained by the Guardian, showed Egyptian police torturing detainees in a Cairo police station.
In the first video, covertly recorded by a detainee through a cell door, appears to show two inmates hung in stress positions.
The detainees are naked from the waist up and suspended from a metal grate by their arms, which are fastened behind their backs.
“Watch how they are torturing us and our colleagues. They came and told us we’re next,” one detainee says.
In the second video, inmates in an overcrowded cell line up to display injuries they say were inflicted by police officials and investigators, including open wounds on their heads and bruises across their chests and backs. “They are hitting us with sticks,” they say.
The two videos are believed to have been recorded in November last year inside a police station in the working-class el-Salam neighbourhood of northern Cairo.
The videos surfaced nearly 12 years after the death of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old civilian, in police custody in Alexandria in June 2010.
Said’s death proved to be a watershed, inciting public anger at the impunity of security forces and their treatment of Egyptian citizens, and sparking the protests that began on 25 January 2011.
The 18 days of nationwide protests that followed ended the decades-long reign of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, where abuses by security bodies were widespread.
Yet 11 years after the uprising, testimonies and evidence collected by rights groups allege that abuses by Egypt’s security services are once again out of control.
Since coming to power after a military coup in 2013, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has presided over a renewed era of impunity for security forces, down to the lowest ranks of the police.
