Despite a ruling by Minya Criminal Court on Saturday 15 November to release the detained brothers Rifaat and Ibrahim Fawzy on bail of EGP3000 each, and despite the fact that the bail money was paid, Minya security authorities are still holding the Fawzy brothers in detention. The Fawzys had been charged with killing Mohamed Khalil on the evening of 30 May, during the attack waged against Abu-Fana monastery in Mallawi, Minya, by the ‘Arabs’—the desert dwellers in the area, a date on which the Fawzys were not at the monastery in the first place. The charge was based upon the testimony of the dead man’s father and another Arab, but the after-death investigation on Khalil’s body proved the testimony false; the Fawzys could never have committed the murder.
The Fawzy’s lawyer Zakary Kamal told Watani, as the paper prepared to go to press, that he was filing a claim against the head of Mallawi Investigation, accusing him of falsifying official reports. The investigation officer had arrested the brothers with no legal warrant and questioned them on 1 June, as proved in the prosecution report, but wrote in his report that he arrested them on 4 June. Mr Kamal said he was also filing a claim of false testimony against the witnesses, and was demanding a recompense of one million Egyptian pounds for the moral damages the brothers had incurred.
Mr Kamal said that matters have taken a more complicated turn, since the family of Khalil was asking the Fawzys to pay five million Egyptian pounds in blood money but, he said, the Fawzys are adamant in not paying a penny to absolve themselves of a murder they never committed.