Alaa, the law student, joined here there.Īlthough Mr. Months later, fearing she might be detained again, she fled to Canada, where she was granted political asylum.
She was fired from her job as a software developer and was rejected by some family members. Dozens were convicted and sentenced to one to six years in jail. Outside, the harshest crackdown in years against Egypt’s gay community was underway.Īt least 75 people were charged with debauchery in raids conducted in the days after the concert, said Lobna Darwish, a gender rights researcher at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. She was transferred to Qanatir prison, north of Cairo, and placed in solitary confinement. Hegazi was taken to a police station where she was charged with “inciting debauchery.” In her cell, other female prisoners, encouraged by the police, molested her, she said. “Another time he sarcastically asked why homosexuals don’t sleep with children or animals.” “One time he likened Communism to homosexuality,” she wrote in an article for Mada Masr, an independent news media outlet. She was tortured with electric shocks, she later said in interviews.Īn interrogator challenged her to prove that homosexuality was not a disease. A piece of cloth was stuffed into her mouth. She was blindfolded and taken to a foul-smelling interrogation room where she could hear people groaning with pain. Officers questioned her religious beliefs and asked if she was a virgin. Hegazi’s home and took her to a detention center run by the National Security Agency, a feared arm of Mr. el-Sisi, and who perished in a maximum-security prison in murky circumstances last month.ĭays later, armed security officials arrived at Ms. To supporters, it was another senseless death akin to that of Shady Habash, a 24-year-old video producer who had been jailed for making a pop video that criticized Mr. On social media, many replaced their profiles with rainbow flags, shattered by the loss of another young Egyptian.Īt the other end of the spectrum, others denounced her actions and said she deserved her death.
Hegazi’s final words have reverberated across Egypt amid an outpouring of grief. Sometimes, though, one case cuts through. Repression in Egypt often blurs into the abstraction of numbers - the tens of thousands of political opponents who languish in President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s prisons the hundreds who vanished into detention centers countless others who have been harassed or forced into exile for what they wrote, said or believed. “You’ve been greatly cruel, but I forgive.” She saved her final words for her persecutors. “The experience has been harsh and I’m too weak to resist,” she wrote. In a short, poignant handwritten note, she begged forgiveness for her action from her three siblings, and her friends.