Sanaa Seif, the sister of jailed Egyptian activist and programmer Alaa Abdel Fattah, said she arrived in Cairo to visit her brother during the Eid al-Adha holiday after their mother, Laila Soueif, agreed to take limited doses of glucose to sustain herself until Seif could return to London.
Seif said her brother had lost 29% of his original body weight due to a hunger strike he began in early March, after learning that Soueif’s health had deteriorated amid her own prolonged hunger strike. Soueif, a 69-year-old academic and dual British-Egyptian national, resumed a full hunger strike in May after what she described as the failure of all promises to secure her son’s release, despite his five-year sentence ending legally last September.
Following an exceptional Eid visit to Wadi Al-Natrun prison on Sunday, Seif said the meeting lasted just 20 minutes and took place behind glass. “I saw him through the glass—no hugs, no extra minute, no mercy, no empathy, no Eid,” she wrote on Facebook. “He’s lost a lot of weight, but he looks steady. He’s down about 29% of his original weight.”
Seif is expected to visit her brother again during the prison’s regular visitation hours on Tuesday before returning to London, where she continues to monitor her mother’s health. She said Soueif agreed to a small intravenous dose of glucose to remain stable during her daughter’s brief return to Egypt.
“She has low blood pressure in the mornings, but the readings improve by the end of the day,” Seif wrote, adding, “I pleaded with her to let me go to Egypt for Eid, and she agreed to a small glucose drip. She joked with the doctors, saying she didn’t want them to be greedy.”
Alaa Abdel Fattah has been held in detention on various charges for much of the past decade. In December 2021, Egypt’s Emergency State Security Court sentenced him to five years in prison on charges of “spreading false news.” He had been in pretrial detention since September 2019.
Though his sentence formally ended in late September 2023, authorities have refused to release him. His legal team says this contradicts Egyptian law, which requires that pretrial detention be deducted from the sentence. Authorities, however, contend that the sentence only began when the military ruler ratified it in January 2022, and do not count the pretrial period.
According to Article 482 of Egypt’s Code of Criminal Procedure, the duration of a custodial sentence should be calculated from the day of arrest and should be reduced by the time spent in pretrial detention. Article 484 stipulates that when multiple prison sentences are imposed, the reduction should first be applied to the lighter sentence.
