MANSOURA – The applause of relatives and friends marked the beginning of the hearing for Patrick Zaky, the Egyptian student of the University of Bologna in prison in Egypt since February last year. He appeared for a few seconds in the defendants’ cage around 12.15 during a break from the other hearings and was then taken away following the attention he immediately aroused. Patrick should be back in court anyway.
The Court is the second in the city on the Nile delta, where the boy was born and raised and where he was jailed for almost a month last year at the beginning of his pre-trial detention, before being moved to Tora, the prison for political prisoners. on the outskirts of Cairo. On one of the two rows of wooden benches of a classroom on the third floor are also his father, George, and his sister, Marise. Mom chose to stay at home: “She can’t do it”, say Patrick’s friends.
In the classroom there are also representatives of the embassies of Italy, Canada and Germany: in all 18 people occupy most of the space in the small classroom of Mansoura where hearings are usually held for divorce or personal violence.
Zaky on trial. Egypt: defended the Copts. He faces five years in prison
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Zaky had been arrested at the Cairo airport on his way home to take a break from his studies and see his family again. The accusation is that of “spreading, at home and abroad, false news against the Egyptian state”.
The only known act at the moment, made explicit only yesterday, is an article written by the boy in 2019 for the online magazine Darraj in which he talks about the discrimination suffered by a Coptic Christian soldier who died in Sinai, where Egypt has been leading that which he calls an “anti-terrorism campaign”. An accusation for which he finds himself having to answer before an emergency court that deals with terrorism and a sentence that, for these reasons, will be final.
“Thus Egypt discriminates against us Copts”: the indictment against Patrick Zaky
at Patrick Zaky
Chess games, the hobby of carving and Mahfouz’s books: Patrick Zaky’s prisons
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