LUXOR (Middle East Eye) – The arrest of an Egyptian opposition activist in the city of Luxor after his plane was forced to undertake an emergency landing while en route from Sudan to Turkey has shocked human rights advocates in the country.
The young man, identified by a rights group as 29-year-old Hossam Menoufi Mahmoud Sallam, was on board Badr Airlines flight No. J4690 from Khartoum to Istanbul on Wednesday when it landed at Luxor Airport in southern Egypt.
Egyptian authorities have not confirmed the detention of Sallam, which the Istanbul-based rights group We Record called an “enforced disappearance” as he has been held incommunicado since.
According to a statement by the airlines, the flight had to land in Luxor after a warning from the smoke detection system in cargo cabin room no. 1.
The signal was a false one, however, and no faults in the system were found when the plane landed, the statement said.
To fix the alarm system, the plane was sent to Bratislava Airport for maintenance, and a replacement plane was sent from Khartoum to take the passengers to Istanbul.
When passengers were completing the boarding of the second plane, they were required to go through passport controls again in Luxor.
“Boarding the alternative plane makes the Egyptian authorities part of the travel procedures as applied in the flight regulations, and this is what led to the arrest of the aforementioned passenger,” the statement pointed out.
The company denied complicity in handing over the Egyptian passenger, saying “it has nothing to do whatsoever in the actions taken by the Egyptian authorities or against the aforementioned passenger,” and that it was not aware of the reasons for the arrest.
Sallam, a civil engineer, was a frequent traveler between Sudan and Turkey for a private engineering business, according to human rights researcher and advocate Haitham Ghonim.
Sallam was known to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition group, which has been labeled as a terrorist organization by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
He had been sentenced to 25 years in absentia after a mass military trial, in connection with case no. 64 of the year 2017, dubbed in the media as “The deputy attorney general case.” The charges brought against him by a military prosecutor included “possession of firearms”, but no evidence was provided to support that accusation, Ghonim said.
He has been based in Sudan out of fear of persecution in Egypt.
Sisi rose to power after ousting president Mohamed Morsi, a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, in a 2013 military coup. Since then, his government has targeted members and supporters of Morsi’s administration in a large-scale crackdown. In June 2019, Morsi died while in custody in circumstances described by UN experts as “state-sanctioned arbitrary killing”.
It remains unclear whether the emergency landing was coordinated by the two governments of Egypt and Sudan, whose military leaders are allies.