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US urges accountability in Egypt police brutality case

28 July 2010 21:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. US Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday he hoped that an investigation into a case of police brutality in Egypt would be transparent and those responsible would be brought to justice, APA reports quoting news.yahoo.com website.
Holder said he raised with Egyptian officials the case of 28-year-old Khaled Said, who died last month and for which two policemen are on trial.
"Our hope is that the investigation is done in a transparent way, that if there is liability to be found then those who were responsible for anything that is deemed to be inappropriate will be held accountable," Holder told a small group of reporters in Cairo.
According to witnesses to the incident, Said was approached by the two plainclothes policemen in an Internet cafe on June 6 who demanded to search him. When he refused, they dragged him out and beat him to death.
Two autopsies ordered by Egypt’s state prosecutor concluded that Said had died of asphyxiation after swallowing a bag of marijuana when he saw the police officers approaching.
The official version has been rejected by rights groups who say Egypt’s decades-old emergency law, which grants police wide powers, has created a culture of impunity.
Egypt has been criticised abroad for its use of emergency law, which was this year renewed for a further two years, despite repeated government promises to abolish it.
Holder, who also met with a number of reform activists, said Egypt was still lagging in human rights.
"There has been much progress in Egypt in the past few years; I think much more work remains to be done," Holder said.
He said the United States hoped that parliamentary elections this year and presidential elections in 2011 would be "free and fair."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who is 82 and had a gall bladder operation in March, has been in power since 1981. He has not yet announced whether he will run for a fifth six-year term.