Rights and Accountability 28 September 2013
Update Sunday, 29 September 2013: Sharif Kouddous, a journalist in Egypt, has reported that Greyson and Loubani’s detention has been extended for another 45 days.
Today the Toronto Star reports that John Greyson and Tarek Loubani will be charged:
…in an interview from New York on Friday, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty told the Star “there is a solid basis, according to the attorney general’s office, to charge them in the near future.”
Still image from video report by London Free Press reporter Hank Daniszewski from London, Ontario rally on Tuesday 24 September 2013.
Greyson, a prominent Canadian director and York University professor, and Loubani, an emergency room doctor and teacher at the University of Western Ontario, have been jailed in Egypt as they attempted to reach Gaza.
Greyson and Loubani launched a hunger strike earlier in September in protest of their prison conditions and lack of due process.
Harrowing statement
In response to the impending charges, Justin Podur and Cecilia Greyson have posted the following statement from John Greyson and Tarek Loubani.
We are on the 12th day of our hunger strike at Tora, Cairo’s main prison, located on the banks of the Nile. We’ve been held here since August 16 in ridiculous conditions: no phone calls, little to no exercise, sharing a 3 meter x 10 meter cell with 36 other political prisoners, sleeping like sardines on concrete with the cockroaches; sharing a single tap of earthy Nile water.
We never planned to stay in Egypt longer than overnight. We arrived in Cairo on the 15th [of August] with transit visas and all the necessary paperwork to proceed to our destination: Gaza. Tarek volunteers at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and brings people with him each time. John intended to shoot a short film about Tarek’s work.
Because of the coup, the official Rafah border was opening and closing randomly, and we were stuck in Cairo for the day. We were carrying portable camera gear (one light, one microphone, John’s HD Canon, two Go-Pros) and gear for the hospital (routers for a much-needed wifi network and two disassembled toy-sized helicopters for testing the transportation of medical samples).
Because of the protests in Ramses Square and around the country on the 16th [of August], our car couldn’t proceed to Gaza. We decided to check out the Square, five blocks from our hotel, carrying our passports and John’s HD camera. The protest was just starting – peaceful chanting, the faint odor of tear gas, a helicopter lazily circling overhead – when suddenly calls of “doctor.” A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding. The wounded and dying never stopped coming. Between us, we saw over fifty Egyptians die: students, workers, professionals, professors, all shapes, all ages, unarmed. We later learned the body count for the day was 102.
We left in the evening when it was safe, trying to get back to our hotel on the Nile. We stopped for ice cream. We couldn’t find a way through the police cordon though, and finally asked for help at a check point.
That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist’, slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing CPR, or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.
We were two of 602 arrested that night, all 602 potentially facing the same grab-bag of ludicrous charges: arson, conspiracy, terrorism, possession of weapons, firearms, explosives, attacking a police station. The arrest stories of our Egyptian cellmates are remarkably similar to ours: Egyptians who were picked up on dark streets after the protest, by thugs or cops, blocks or miles from the police station that is the alleged site of our alleged crimes.
We’ve been here in Tora prison for six weeks, and are now in a new cell (3.5m x 5.5m) that we share with ‘only’ six others. We’re still sleeping on concrete with the cockroaches, and still share a single tap of Nile water, but now we get (almost) daily exercise and showers. Still no phone calls. The prosecutor won’t say if there’s some outstanding issue that’s holding things up. The routers, the film equipment, or the footage of Tarek treating bullet wounds through that long bloody afternoon? Indeed, we would welcome our day in a real court with the real evidence, because then this footage would provide us with our alibi and serve as a witness to the massacre.
We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.
Peace, John & Tarek
