Secrets pour from pilfered Egypt files
HANNAH ALLAM – MCT
Israa Abdel Fattah, an Egyptian activist, reads files about herself.
Ahmed Ali – AP
Egyptian protesters rifle through an office at the state security building headquarters in Cairo’s Nasr City neighborhood on Saturday. They seized computer hard drives and documents collected by ousted leader Hosni Mubarak’s dreaded spy agency.
CAIRO Less than a month after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s caretaker government faces a new crisis: what to do about thousands of documents that protesters seized from State Security offices over the weekend.
The military-led interim authority has demanded that the classified files kept by Mubarak’s dreaded internal spy agency be returned. Instead, they’re being scattered throughout Egypt like confetti, with new finds turning up on Facebook and Twitter hourly, forcing the government to respond to them and raising fears among some activists that their value has been reduced for any future prosecutions for torture and kidnapping.
What the documents reveal is both salacious and sinister.
One file includes a sex tape purportedly involving a Kuwaiti princess and a prominent Egyptian businessman. Another paints Egypt’s highest-ranking cleric as a womanizer.
Israa Abdel Fattah, 32, a labor organizer and blogger, shared her personal file with McClatchy and marveled at the thoroughness of the surveillance, which included detailed transcripts of e-mails sent from her personal Gmail account and phone conversations she’d had with her ex-husband. The feeling of violation was indescribable, she said.
“I knew they were watching me, but I never imagined they knew all this information about me,” she said. “My friends tried to take me out to dinner that night; they tried to make me laugh, but I couldn’t.” Perhaps the most controversial document to ricochet around Internet message boards was one that purports to lay out State Security’s involvement in a deadly church bombing on New Year’s Day in the port city of Alexandria. The bombing killed 21 people and wounded 80, the worst violence against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority in more than a decade.
The legitimacy of the document hasn’t been determined, but its distribution touched off protests Sunday in Cairo by hundreds of Coptic Christians.
From the beginning, Copts, especially those in Alexandria, had suspected state involvement in the blast, noting that a stepped-up security force that was supposed to have protected the church had vanished before the bomb exploded.
There are also several files that back State Security officers’ reputation for torture. In one letter stamped “top secret” in 2008 and now available on Facebook, a senior official wrote that detainees suffered injuries in State Security custody. He complained that questioning had to be delayed until the wounds had healed.
Other files show the mundane workings of a police state that spent reams of paper on transcriptions of ordinary phone conversations such as one that began, “How are you doing, Mom?”
Almost all the documents bear the State Security letterhead and the signatures of senior officers.
Military officers who were on the scene when the protesters barged into the State Security headquarters in Cairo and other cities tried to recover the documents, wrangling some of them. A senior prosecutor took possession of others.
A message Sunday on the official Facebook page of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which is now running the country, ordered anyone in possession of the files to stop publishing them and to hand them over immediately.
