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Cables: FBI trained Egypt’s state security ‘torturers’

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‘Thousands’ of protesters may have been tortured: report

Egypt’s secret police, long accused of torturing suspects and intimidating political opponents of President Hosni Mubarak, received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as US diplomats compiled allegations of brutality against them, according to US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

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One cable, dated November 2007 and published by the Telegraph, describes a meeting between the head of the SSIS, Egypt’s secret police, and FBI deputy director John Pistole, in which the secret police chief praises Pistole for the “excellent and strong” cooperation between the two agencies. (Pistole has since been appointed head of the TSA.)

SSIS chief Abdul Rahman said the FBI’s training sessions at Quantico were of “great benefit” to his agency. The cables did not address what sort of training Egyptian secret police received at Quantico, or how many officers were trained there.

In another cable, dated October 2009, a US diplomat reported on allegations from “credible human rights lawyers” that the SSIS was behind the torture of terrorism suspects held in Egyptian jails.

Members of a Hezbollah cell arrested in 2008 were tortured “with electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state’,” the cable stated. The lawyers “asserted that ‘this kind of torture’ is different from what [name redacted] normally sees, and speculated that a special branch of Interior Ministry State Security (SSIS) could be directing the torture.”

The history of torture allegations against the SSIS reaches back decades, but allegations have grown since the war on terror was launched after 9/11. In a 2007 report, Amnesty International accused the Egyptian government of turning the country into a “torture center” for war on terror suspects.

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“We are now uncovering evidence of Egypt being a destination of choice for third-party or contracted-out torture in the ‘war on terror’,” Amnesty’s Kate Allen said at the time.

The Egyptian government acknowledged in 2005 that the US had transferred 60 to 70 detainees to Egypt since 2001.

‘THOUSANDS’ MAY HAVE BEEN TORTURED AMID PROTESTS: REPORT

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The latest accusations of torture coming out of Egypt focus not on the SSIS, but on the Egyptian army, which in the early days of the Egyptian protests was lauded for taking a hands-off approach and not attempting to suppress the demonstrations.

According to the Guardian, witnesses reported “extensive beatings and other abuses at the hands of the military in what appears to be an organized campaign of intimidation.”

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Egyptian human rights groups say families are desperately searching for missing relatives who have disappeared into army custody. Some of the detainees have been held inside the renowned Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on the edge of Tahrir Square. Those released have given graphic accounts of physical abuse by soldiers who accused them of acting for foreign powers, including Hamas and Israel.

Among those detained have been human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, but most have been released. However, Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights in Cairo, said hundreds, and possibly thousands, of ordinary people had “disappeared” into military custody across the country for no more than carrying a political flyer, attending the demonstrations or even the way they look. Many were still missing.


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Coronavirus: Who is most at risk of dying?

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As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases across 61 countries hit 86,000 Saturday with nearly 3,000 deaths to date, the profile of those most at risk of dying is coming into focus, experts told AFP.

But the overall mortality rate remains uncertain, they said.

The World Health Organization raised its global risk assessment to its top level Friday, with the global health crisis edging closer to a pandemic.

Among those infected with the virus, older adults with preexisting heart conditions or hypertension face a sharply higher risk, according to preliminary statistics, including from a study covering more than 72,000 patients in China.

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Vatican opens archives on history’s most controversial pope

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The Vatican unseals the archives of history's most contentious popes on Monday, potentially shedding light on why Pius XII stayed silent during the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Two hundred researchers have already requested access to the mountain of documents, made available after an inventory that took more than 14 years for Holy See archivists to complete.

Award-winning German religious historian Hubert Wolf will be in Rome on Monday, armed with six assistants and two years of funding to start exploring documents from the "private secretariat" of the late pope.

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According to a report from Reuters, the Trump administration is proposing putting limits on crossing at the U.S/Mexico border in an effort to halt the spread of the coronavirus despite the fact that Mexico has only reported three cases.

According to the report, "The Trump administration is considering imposing entry restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border to control the spread of the coronavirus in the United States, according to two U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials."

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