Esraa el-Taweel, Omar Ali and Suhaib Saad had planned to have a fun night out when they went for a horse ride and a nice dinner June 1. The three friends never anticipated that they would not make it back home.

When all three stopped answering their phones, their families got worried. Ali’s sister Sara is a journalist who learned through her sources that there were dozens of random arrests that night.

Since her brother was last spotted in Maadi, an upscale neighborhood in south Cairo, she headed for the district’s police station searching for him. “The low-ranking police [staff] affirmed that they had seen my brother inside the police station’s prison cells,” Sara told Al-Monitor, “but the police officers denied that he was in their custody.”

Since April, there have been dozens of similar incidents. Activists, students and ordinary citizens in the wrong place at the wrong time have all disappeared. Their families receive informal and unverifiable information about their detention from the police and other prisoners, but the authorities deny their involvement and never officially admit to having arrested them. The Ministry of Interior issued several statements to local newspapers claiming that it is bound by legal procedures and would never arrest anyone without a warrant and a clear charge.