Egypt: Video Shows Police Shot Woman at Protest | WPN World People News

Photographs, videos, and witness statements strongly indicate that a member of Egypt’s security forces was responsible for fatally shooting a female protester in a downtown Cairo square on January 24, 2015, Human Rights Watch said on 1 February.

Evidence analyzed by Human Rights Watch shows a uniformed police officer apparently directing a masked man who fires a shotgun toward a group of about two dozen peaceful protesters whom police were dispersing from Talaat Harb Square. Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, 32, is seen immediately falling to the ground following the shot. She died later from what medical authorities described as “birdshot” injuries. Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat announced an investigation into al-Sabbagh’s death the same day.

“The prosecutor general needs to follow through on his pledge to bring those responsible for al-Sabbagh’s death to justice,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. “The world is watching to see whether this case breaks the pattern of impunity for rights abuses that has marred Egyptian justice since the 2011 uprising.”

The prosecutor general said that investigators would review all the available evidence, including surveillance camera footage and official logbooks detailing the weapons used by security forces, and would question the police who dispersed the protest. In a statement, Barakat confirmed his office’s “commitment to apply the law to everyone with all firmness and without discrimination and present the perpetrators of the incident – whoever they were – to criminal prosecution.”

However, Barakat also said that “preliminary investigations” had found that the police had only used teargas, and only after the protesters had failed to respond to police orders to leave and had injured police with rocks and fireworks. On January 28, 2015, an official from the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, told the media that the projectile that killed al-Sabbagh was not a type that the security forces use and suggested that videos of her being shot were fabricated.

On January 31, the Qasr al-Nil district prosecutor’s office, which is investigating the incident, ordered the arrest of the vice president of al-Sabbagh’s political party, 60-year-old Zohdi al-Shami, who had been present at the protest and had gone to the prosecutor to offer testimony. Prosecutors questioned al-Shami as a suspect for about nine hours before ordering his arrest, according to one of al-Shami’s lawyers, Mohamed Abd al-Aziz. They presented a report from the National Security Investigations Service that said al-Shami is suspected of having carried a weapon to the protest, Abd al-Aziz told Human Rights Watch.

Prosecutors have also charged nearly a dozen people involved in the protest with breaking an anti-protest law passed in November 2013 than bans all unauthorized gatherings, according to some of those charged. One witness told Human Rights Watch that the district prosecutor investigating the killing initially attempted to arrest her when she offered her statement.

Human Rights Watch interviewed four witnesses to the shooting and analyzed 18 photographs and three videos. This evidence shows that the security forces deployed in Talaat Harb Square that day used excessive force in response to a small, peaceful march organized by the Popular Socialist Alliance Party, and fired teargas and birdshot at the protesters apparently without warning.

One video that shows security forces dispersing the protest captured what appears to be the moment that al-Sabbagh was shot. Four gunshots are audible in the video. The first two were fired in quick succession at the outset of the dispersal, with the third shot nine seconds later and the fourth shot seven seconds after that. When the first two shots were fired, protesters on the sidewalk carrying a large red banner had begun moving away, southwest along Talaat Harb Street toward Tahrir Square. Their banner can be seen near the door of the Air France office that faces Talaat Harb Square. Based on published photographs showing both al-Sabbagh and the banner at this position, al-Sabbagh was standing and was not wounded at that time.

In the video, the protesters can be seen walking southwest farther along Talaat Harb Street, pursued by the police, when the third shot is heard. At that moment, a masked man in dark clothes is seen standing beside a uniformed officer, identified as a police brigadier general, in the street. The masked man adopts a shooting stance and points his firearm in the protesters’ direction as the police officer runs toward and points at the protesters. Three photographs published by local media organizations also show this moment, with the police officer and the gunman, from different angles.

Hisham Abd al-Hamid, spokesperson for the Justice Ministry’s Forensic Medical Authority, told the television channel Al-Hayat in a January 24, 2015 interview that al-Sabbagh had been shot in the back and neck by birdshot from a distance of about eight meters. A forensic medical report documenting al-Sabbagh’s death, photos of which were posted on Twitter, states that al-Sabbagh died after being shot in the back, causing lacerations to her lungs and heart and massive bleeding in her chest.

The United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, which set out international law on the use of force in law enforcement situations, provide that security forces shall as far as possible apply nonviolent means before resorting to the use of force. Whenever the lawful use of force is unavoidable, the authorities should use restraint and act in proportion to the seriousness of the offense. Lethal force may only be used when strictly unavoidable to protect life.

“The claim that these protesters attacked police or that the images of al-Sabbagh’s death are fabricated simply defies all available evidence and smacks of an attempted cover up,” Whitson said. “After so many protesters have died exercising their basic rights, the prosecutor general needs to step up and ensure that those responsible for this death are held to account.”

Source: Human Rights Watch