The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) recorded the killing of 573 individuals by police forces across various governorates between January 2025 and the end of June 2026.
According to the rights group, the deaths were detailed across 206 official press statements issued by the Ministry of Interior. The ministry routinely categorized the operations as “preemptive strikes” against “highly dangerous criminal elements,” claiming the suspects were killed after “exchanges of fire initiated by the suspects” against security forces.
In a statement released on Thursday, EIPR emphasized that official accounts, which typically conclude with the brief phrase “legal measures have been taken”, lack any declaration of judicial or independent investigations to verify whether police adhered to standards of necessity and proportionality, or whether lethal force was used strictly as a last resort.
According to EIPR’s tracking, the Interior Ministry announced the killing of 404 people across 146 security statements in 2025 alone. That figure is 17 times higher than the total number of judicial executions carried out in the country during the same year. The rights group noted that during the first half of 2026, the ministry reported the killing of another 169 individuals under similar circumstances.
The rights organization explained that closing these incidents via press releases issued by the executing authority itself, coupled with the absence of public investigations, prevents any independent scrutiny of official accounts or verification of whether these incidents constitute “extrajudicial killings.”
The report highlighted the targeting of two young men—Youssef Al-Sarhani, 18, and Faraj Al-Fazari, 21—in Matrouh governorate in April 2025 as a “clear example” of the doubts surrounding Interior Ministry statements.
The incident began following the killing of three police officers in the city of Al-Njeila. Rights documentation confirmed that security forces detained several local women to pressure the primary suspect into surrendering.
After local residents handed the two young men over for questioning, the Interior Ministry announced hours later that they had been “killed in a shootout” as “highly dangerous criminal elements.”
The statement made no mention of the men initiating gunfire, nor did it reference the primary suspect accused of killing the police officers, who remains at large.
The defense attorney for the two men confirmed that neither had prior convictions nor had they ever been investigated in connection with criminal cases. Meanwhile, no independent investigation was opened to determine the level of threat posed by the two youths against heavily armed and trained security forces that would justify killing them rather than taking them into custody.
Policy and Legal Frameworks
EIPR linked the rising death toll to an established security policy spanning more than a decade. The report traced this approach to statements made in 2012 by former Interior Minister Major General Mohamed Ibrahim, who promised to reward any officer who kills a thug who initiates gunfire, as well as 2025 remarks by former security officials praising the elimination of dangerous elements without referring them to courts—a direct violation of Article 96 of the Egyptian Constitution, which affirms that “an accused person is innocent until proven guilty.”
On the legislative front, EIPR noted that Article 102 of the Police Authority Law (No. 109 of 1971) and Interior Ministerial Decree No. 156 of 1964 classify firearms as a “last resort” meant for apprehension rather than killing, requiring officers to issue verbal warnings and aim at the legs whenever possible.
The organization stressed that Egyptian law contains no provision permitting the use of lethal force without accountability, except for Article 8 of the Anti-Terrorism Law (No. 94 of 2015)—a provision that does not apply to the vast majority of these reported incidents, which involve ordinary criminal offenses.
Furthermore, Article 61 of the Penal Code, regarding self-defense, does not negate the requirement to open judicial investigations into the causes of death.
In light of its findings, EIPR called on Prosecutor General Counsel Mohamed Shawky to open urgent, independent judicial investigations into all 573 killings cited in Interior Ministry statements over the past 18 months.
The organization urged Interior Minister Major General Mahmoud Tawfiq to immediately announce an end to “immediately renounce the policy of “liquidating” individuals wanted by justice,” and to reassert forces’ compliance with Article 41 of the Police Law, which mandates integrity, procedural legality, and restraint.
EIPR also called on the House of Representatives to review the Police Authority Law to incorporate international principles on the use of force, amend Article 8 of the Anti-Terrorism Law to prevent impunity, and establish an independent committee to revisit EIPR’s 2012 proposal for an independent body with full investigative authority to monitor police conduct and investigate deaths and severe injuries resulting from police actions.
