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May 11, 2006
Letters from an Egyptian Prison: Another Blogger is Detained
Fresh on the heels of Hao Wu's arrest by Chinese authorities, Egyptian blogger Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam has been detained by Egyptian police. Several days ago, Alaa was participating in a peaceful protest in support of an independent Egyptian judiciary when he was picked up by authorities and detained.
His wife Manal writes
Alaa and the rest of the group that was kidnapped yesterday, will be detained for 15 days. They didnt go directly to the prison as we thought, but spent the night at the Khalifa's police station and are supposed to be transferred to the prisons now. The 3 women will go to El Qanater prison, as Tora prison where the rest of the 40 detainees are held has no section for women, and the men are supposed to join the rest and go to Tora prison, but some think that they will also taken to El Qanater prison (which has sections for both men and women).
Amazingly, Alaa is blogging from prison. It seems that he's writing blog entries on paper so they can be taken out of prison and posted. In his latest post, Alaa writes
Today it hit me, I am really in prison. I'm not sure how I feel. I thought I was OK but I took forever to wake up. The way fellow prisoners look at me tells me I do not feel well but I can't really feel it.I'd say prison is not like I expected, but I had no expectations. No images, not even fears, nothing. Guess it will take time. I expect to spend no less than a month here. I'm sure that's enough time to see all the ugly sides of prison, to be genuinely depressed.
Meanwhile, bloggers involved in the Global Voices blog have started a "Google Bomb" campaign. No, it's not what you think. A Google Bomb is an online campaign where lots of bloggers all use the same word to link to the same page. In this case, participants - including myself - are linking the word Egypt to The Free Alaa blog. Because Google determines search rank in part by the number of people linking to a site with specific keywords, the goal here is to cause any Google search for the word Egypt to go to the blog about Alaa's arrest. At last check, the site still isn't in the top 100 search results, but hopefully that will change soon.
All bloggers are strongly encouraged to participate in the campaign and hopefully shame the Egyptian government into releasing Alaa immediately. -andy
Posted by acarvin at May 11, 2006 10:43 AM
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