The Supreme State Security Prosecution has ordered the release of Sayed Ali Fahim Al-Azab, known as Sayed Mushagheb, leader of the Ultras White Knights fan group, along with political activists Sherif El-Roubi and Nermin Hussein, rights lawyer Khaled Ali said on Facebook.
Islam Salama, a rights lawyer on Hussein’s defense team at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said he had been officially notified of the release orders. He said release procedures usually take one to three days, but could move faster in this case because the three are well-known activists.
Salama told Al Manassa he did not expect the three activists to be rotated into new cases or for their release to be obstructed.
Mushagheb was arrested in 2015 and, despite receiving a prison sentence, remained behind bars beyond the legal term of his punishment because authorities refused to count his pretrial detention toward his sentence, while also rotating him into new cases to keep him in continuous detention, the Justice for Human Rights organization said two weeks ago.
El-Roubi, the former spokesperson for the April 6 Youth Movement, was rearrested in early 2023, only months after his previous release. He was then brought before the Supreme State Security Prosecution in Case No. 1634 of 2022 on charges of joining a banned group and spreading false news, after a television interview in which he spoke about the difficulty released detainees face in finding work.
More recently, El-Roubi appeared at a detention renewal hearing unable to speak due to a serious facial nerve disorder and complained to the court that prison authorities had refused to allow him to see a specialist for treatment, according to his lawyer Nabeh Elganadi, who spoke to Al Manassa.
Hussein was arrested six years ago, in March 2020, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. She was charged with spreading false news about the coronavirus pandemic and joining a banned group, and ordered held pending investigation in Case No. 535 of 2020, even though the legal conditions for pretrial detention did not apply to her under the Criminal Procedure Law and despite the health risks posed by the pandemic at the time.
Although a release order was issued for her in January 2021, the Ministry of Interior did not carry it out. She was later rotated into a new case, No. 65 of 2021, on similar charges, and her detention continued to be routinely renewed until it exceeded twice the legal maximum for pretrial detention of two years.
