Detainee’s death raises concerns on conditions of prisoners in Egypt
Egyptian artist Shady Habash died under strange circumstances in a prison cell where he had been in pretrial detention since 2018, raising criticism from local and international rights organizations.
CAIRO — "Prison doesn’t kill but loneliness does. I need your support in order not to die. I tried to resist on my own … so that I get out the person you’ve known; but I can’t take it anymore." An Egyptian artist wrote these words a few months before he died in the early hours of May 2 in a Cairo prison.
Independent filmmaker and photographer Shady Habash's gloomy words have seen light through his friends and are providing people of a reminder of his ordeal.
“To resist in prison means to resist and preserve yourself and your humanity from the negative impact of what you see or survive every day. The simplest [thing] … is to go crazy or to die slowly being held in a room for two years and forgotten about,” he wrote.
Habash — who was detained after directing a music video satirizing Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2018 — died at age 24 inside the maximum security Tora prison.
