Since yesterday, Ezzat Ghonim, a human rights lawyer and director of the Egyptian NGO Coordination for Rights and Freedoms, has been untraceable. Amnesty International fears that he may have been kidnapped by Egyptian state agents and is therefore a new victim of enforced disappearance.
Yesterday, at 17.30, Ghonim called his wife and told her that he was leaving work and would be home in 30 minutes. After an hour his wife, worried about the delay, tried to call him but the user was off or unreachable.
He then made a series of phone calls to his colleagues, in hospitals and at the police station, but he did not hear from her husband. In the night he then tried to call her husband, this time the audience was free but no one answered.
Ghonim's wife wrote to the Ministry of the Interior and the office of the Attorney General asking to provide her with news, but to no avail. In a July 2016 report, Amnesty International reported an average of two to three enforced disappearances per day. Since the beginning of the year, the human rights organization has already denounced several cases, including those of the journalist Mustafa al-Aassar and the activist and his roommate Hassan al-Banna and, again, that of the party's vice president of opposition Strong Egypt.
All three, later, appeared in the offices of the State Security Office. They have to answer for invented accusations of spreading false information in order to damage national security and belonging to outlaw groups.