April 6 Movement another victim of Egypt crackdown

Three leading activists from the April 6 Youth Movement, including founder Ahmed Maher, remain behind bars as Egypt's crackdown widens to include secular activists.
Activist Ahmed Maher stands behind bars at a court in Cairo April 7, 2014. An Egyptian appeals court on Monday upheld the jailing of three leading figures of the 2011 pro-democracy uprising, tightening a crackdown on secular activists opposed to the army-backed government. A court handed down three-year sentences on Monday to the three liberal activists, Ahmed Maher, Ahmed Douma and Mohamed Adel, last December for protesting without permission and assaulting the police. REUTERS/Al Youm Al Saabi Newspaper (E
Activist Ahmed Maher stands behind bars at a court in Cairo, April 7, 2014. - REUTERS/Al Youm Al Saabi Newspaper
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Tom Rollins
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CAIRO — "We have been living in a comic strip," claimed April 6 Movement founder Ahmed Maher in a recent letter smuggled from his prison cell.

He was talking about Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's will-he-won't-he presidential bid, but with Egypt's recent legacy of revolutions contorted in and out of shape, its media's cartoonish re-imaginings of events and a state flexing its muscles, Maher could have been talking about a lot of things. The group he helped found, the April 6 Youth Movement, has been a central character in all this.

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