A 35-year-old man died inside a police station on the outskirts of Cairo only hours after his arrest, prompting fresh concerns over torture and detention conditions as new rights reports document tens of thousands of violations across Egypt’s security apparatus since 2013.
The Al-Shehab Centre for Human Rights said on Wednesday that Khalil Muhammad Abu Heba, a car dealer and father of four from Mahalla al-Kubra, died shortly after being brought into Mahalla Third Police Station.
According to the centre, he was arrested on 8 October in circumstances his family described as "raising suspicions of torture and ill-treatment inside the detention facility".
Family members and eyewitnesses told the centre that assistant detective Ahmed Rifaat al-Saeedi detained Abu Heba at a cafe, searched him without finding anything, and allegedly assaulted him verbally before "forcibly restraining him" with the help of informants and seizing his car keys.
The family said Abu Heba entered the station "fully conscious and able to move", adding he was heard pleading with his lawyer minutes earlier: "Help me… they’ve taken me in with nothing on me."
They were notified of his death roughly half an hour later. Testimonies cited by the centre state he was removed from the station "a lifeless body showing signs that suggest electric shocks, severe beating and clear humiliation", without an ambulance being called.
Despite these allegations, the family told Al-Shehab that the prosecutor’s report recorded the death as a heart attack, "without mentioning any causes or marks indicating torture or assault", raising fears of a cover-up.
Al-Shehab said the circumstances of his death "represent a grave violation of the right to life" and called for an urgent, impartial investigation. Egypt’s Interior Ministry has not commented.
Long-term, systemic abuses
The case comes as two broader human rights reports released for International Human Rights Day paint a stark picture of long-term, systemic abuses inside Egypt’s detention network.
A report by Human Rights Egypt, titled "Harvest of Injustice", recorded 20,344 cases of enforced disappearance since June 2013, including 1,333 people who vanished in 2025 alone. The organisation also documented 1,266 deaths in custody from 2013 to 2025, attributing many to medical neglect and poor detention conditions.
It noted that hundreds of political prisoners have received mass death sentences, with 1,613 rulings issued and 105 executions carried out.
The report also highlighted the continued use of "recycling cases" - re-accusing detainees in new cases immediately after courts order their release - documenting more than 2,700 incidents between 2018 and 2021 and additional cases through 2024.
A separate study released jointly by the Egyptian Human Rights Platform and the Committee for Justice detailed the experiences of former political prisoners, citing "humanitarian disasters" caused by medical neglect.
Torture, deaths in custody
The Committee for Justice recorded 39 deaths in custody since the start of 2024 and more than 35 cases of psychological, physical, or sexual torture between January and June. El-Nadim Center separately documented 55 cases of individual torture in 2024.
Between 2020 and 2023, the Committee for Justice tracked 31,450 violations inside prisons and detention facilities, including arbitrary deprivation of liberty, enforced disappearance, poor conditions of confinement, torture, and deaths in custody.
Human rights lawyer Khalaf Bayoumi, director of Al-Shehab, said the reports reflect “an unprecedented deterioration in the human rights situation in Egypt,” pointing to "the numbers of detainees, the records of the forcibly disappeared, the desperate pleas from prisons, and the violations suffered by women".
He noted that these abuses continue "despite the recommendations issued on the Egyptian file" during the 2025 UN Universal Periodic Review.
Bayoumi added that Egyptian authorities have "turned a deaf ear" to calls to ease pretrial detention, ban enforced disappearance, or reduce prison abuses.
He expressed hope that the recently launched "Popular Committee for the Defence of Prisoners of Conscience" may help amplify demands for the release of political detainees, including women, the sick, and the elderly.