University student tortured to death in Egyptian police station, says rights group
A university student has been tortured to death inside an Egyptian police station, a rights group told Middle East Eye.
The Egyptian Network for Human Rights (ENHR) said that 21-year-old Ayman Sabry Abdel Wahab died on Friday while in custody at the Belqas Police Station in the Dakhalia governorate, north east of Cairo, following “a week of deadly torture”.
Riots erupted in the aftermath of his arrest, with journalists sharing footage of protestors clashing with security forces outside Belqas court.
According to the ENHR, Sabry was arrested on 19 July while he was on his way to a barber shop.
He was then taken to Belqas Police Station and detained for several days, during which time he was subjected to severe torture that resulted in a “serious deterioration in his health”.
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Sabry’s family reported that he collapsed in front of prison guards during a visit on Friday after handing them a list of medication without explanation.
They said that he was not transferred to hospital for medical treatment and a doctor was not called to examine him.
The family were not officially informed of Sabry’s death, only hearing about it through his lawyer 24 hours later in the early hours of Sunday morning.
“He came out of detention dead,” Sabry’s sister told ENHR.
According to ENHR, the police are claiming that Sabry suffered a cardiac arrest. But his sister said that, when her family went to identify his body at the hospital, it bore the signs of beatings and electric shocks.
“His face was ruined, his body used to be white as cotton, but his whole dead body was blue,” she told ENHR.
“My brother died from torture, and the ones who killed him work at Belqas Police Station,” Sabry’s sister said, naming a senior investigations officer at the station as one of the perpetrators of the torture that killed her brother.
Ahmed Attar, the executive director of ENHR, emphasised that Sabry’s death is not an isolated case but a “natural consequence of the unchecked power of the executive authorities, the absence of proper oversight and inspection by the public prosecution, and the continued application of the policy of impunity practiced by the Egyptian state”.
“The death of this university student is neither the first nor likely to be the last to occur in Egyptian prisons and detention centers,” he warned.
Surging abuses
Sabry’s death comes amid a surge in detainee deaths in Egyptian prisons and police stations amid rapidly deteriorating conditions and spiralling abuses.
In May, Egyptian rights monitor the Committee for Justice (CFJ) reported that so far in 2025, 15 prisoners had died in Egyptian custody, the majority of them due to medical negligence.
In July, 15 prisoners reportedly attempted suicide at Egypt’s notorious Badr 3 prison within just two weeks.
Rights groups have documented surging abuses in Egyptian prisons since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power in 2014.
While official figures are cloaked in secrecy, under Sisi, Egypt's prison population is estimated to have swelled to around 120,000 as of 2022, despite the prison system’s capacity being at 55,000 in 2020.
The surge has resulted in dangerous overcrowding, crumbling infrastructure and further exacerbated poor detention conditions.
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