Rights group accuses Egyptian police of defenestrating man

May 25, 2009, 14:27 GMT

Cairo - Egyptian security officers threw a man from his fourth-floor apartment after he asked them to produce a search warrant, a human rights group said on Monday.

Officers from Egypt's domestic intelligence agency, State Security Investigations, threw Faris Barakat from his friend's apartment on the fourth floor of a building in the western Nile Delta town of Damanhur, Cairo's Nadim Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence said on Monday.

The officers had come to arrest Barakat's friend Ahmed Ali Hussein, apparently on suspicion of belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, during his daughter's seventh birthday party on May 17, the Nadim Centre said.

A source in the Egyptian Interior Ministry, speaking to the German Press Agency dpa on condition of anonymity, said the rights group's charges were entirely baseless.

'Nothing of the sort happened,' he said.

The Nadim Centre distributed a photograph of Barakat handcuffed to a hospital bed, saying he had sustained multiple fractures to his back, leg, hip, and nose, and that he had trouble breathing because of internal bleeding.

'We want Egyptian security to stop throwing people from their windows, and doctors to stop handcuffing patients to their hospital beds,' Aida Seif al-Dawla, director of the centre, told the German Press Agency dpa.

She said the public prosecutor in Damanhur, 165 kilometres north-west of Cairo, had denied requests from Barakat's family and lawyers to investigate the incident.

Two opposition members of parliament, Zakaria al-Ganaini and Mohammed al-Gazzar, have submitted an 'urgent request' to question Egyptian Minister of Interior Habib al-Adli over the case, Cairo's al-Shuruq newspaper reported on Saturday.