CAIRO: Egyptian opposition figure Yahya Abdelhadi has been questioned and detained on terrorism charges, prominent lawyer Khaled Ali said on Thursday, two years after the dissident received a presidential pardon.
Ali said on Facebook that he was informed by authorities late Wednesday that Abdelhadi had been transferred to the State Security General Prosecutor’s Office, adding in a subsequent post that the “interrogation has now ended” and that Abdelhadi had been transferred to prison.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office has issued an order to detain engineer Yahya Abdelhadi for 15 days,” he said in a post early Thursday morning.
“The charges include joining a terrorist group, abusing social media, broadcasting and publishing rumors and false news, committing the crime of financing terrorism and inciting the commission of a terrorist crime.”
Ali previously disclosed that the veteran opposition figure was forcibly taken from his car on a busy Cairo street by “a number of plainclothes individuals” who “kidnapped him to an unknown location”.
Abdelhadi was among the first dissidents to be pardoned in 2022 when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi reactivated the presidential pardon committee, seen as a fresh start for Egypt’s maligned human rights record.
He was released in June after three years in prison on charges of “spreading fake news”, although he was convicted just weeks before his release.
Abdelhadi, a critic of the Sisi administration, was a key figure in the Kefaya (Enough) movement that helped topple longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
The government has restarted “national dialogue” since 2022 and released hundreds of political prisoners, but rights groups say at least three times as many have been arrested in the same period.
Human rights activists estimate that Cairo still holds tens of thousands of political prisoners, many in brutal conditions.
