CAIRO: Two Coptic Christian activists accused of sedition and insulting Prophet Mohamed (PBUH) will be released on Sept. 5 after a government investigation found scant evidence to indict them on the charges, said their lawyers.
Adel Faltas Fawzy Hanna and Peter Ezzat, members of the Toronto-based Middle East Christians Association (Meca), were detained on Aug. 9 in a nighttime raid of their homes.
They were accused of contempt for religion and offending Islam in published works, as well as conspiring against Egypt with the aid of a foreign country.
Following the arrests a spokesman from the Ministry of Interior told Daily News Egypt that, “Adel [Fawzy Hanna] wrote on the net subjects…talking in a bad way about Prophet Mohamed [PBUH].” He could provide no further information about his claims.
During the raid police confiscated laptops, CDs, books and cassettes from the men in the search for evidence against them, but from the beginning their lawyers maintained that the charges were baseless.
After almost three weeks of interrogation, it appears the state agrees.
“There is no evidence against them,” said Ramses El Naggar, a member of the legal team.
“Investigations were made by the state and they were found not guilty,” he added. “They belong to a Canadian institution that promotes freedom and equality. The rumors that they insulted the Prophet or Islam are just rumors.”
While the stated reason for their detention was insulting the Prophet, sources close to the men say that the case was really about sending a message to Coptic activists in the wake of recent tensions surrounding the issue of religious conversion.
Earlier this summer Egyptian media was abuzz with the story of Mohamed Hegazy, a Port Said man who made history by filing a court petition to have his religious affiliation changed from Muslim to Christian on his national ID card.
The case sparked a national uproar and Hegazy began receiving anonymous death threats. Fearing for their lives, he and his wife, a convert who is also four months pregnant, have been in hiding ever since.
El Naggar says that his clients were arrested for being supportive of Hegazy. According to him, their real crime was getting too close to a hot social issue.
“Meca helped Hegazy and gave him a platform to talk about his life and his decision to convert from Islam to Christianity,” El Naggar told Daily News Egypt. “Arresting them and putting them in jail was a kind of warning to the organization to keep its distance from these kinds of cases.”
