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"He was a thug," interrupted one member of the sit-in's orange-vested security team, using an Arabic word also applied to petty criminals in the pay of the police. The sit-in security says he smoked drugs in front of demonstrators at prayer, and was ejected from the sit-in. The sit-in participants deny the abuse allegations, pointing out that they themselves were victims of torture by the security forces before Egypt's 2011 uprising. They say some of the bodies may have been dumped by the police
-- who rights groups say routinely torture and sometimes kill political opponents and criminal suspects alike. "That talk is lies, we refuse torture. We ourselves were tortured," said Abdel Majid Barakat, an official on the Rabaah sit-in's committee of safety and organization. Sit-in organizers invite journalists to go wherever they want in the camps. But the encampments sprawl over streets, gardens, and residential areas with many hidden corners. Some local media accounts suggest that jihadist-leaning youth, more radical than the Brotherhood, take charge of security and may be responsible for much of the abuse. Meanwhile, rights groups say the evidence of torture is strong. "It is established that there are some deaths as a result of the detentions," says Heba Morayef of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. She says they fit a pattern over the past two years in which protesters, especially during the tensest demonstrations, have detained and often abused suspected spies. Egypt's street protests have long been accompanied by violence. Mobs have attacked both pro- and anti-Morsi marches, sometimes with firearms. Dozens of people on both sides have been killed in such clashes in the last year alone. Protesters have seized suspected police infiltrators since the early days of the 2011 uprising, when demonstrators detained dozens in Tahrir Square's subway station. The more graphic accusations of torture however are more recent, mostly since the July 3 coup, and have mostly been directed against Islamists. According to the Amnesty report, Mastour Mohamed Sayed, 21, said he was attacked by a group of Morsi supporters near the Rabaah al-Adawiya on July 5, early in the standoff. He said he was driven to the sit-in, held under a podium, beaten with bars, and given electric shocks. Hassan Sabry, 20, said he was dragged by armed assailants into a park adjoining a second sit-in at Cairo University. He says he was handcuffed with plastic wires, and beaten with sticks. He told Amnesty he saw one protester have his throat slit and another being stabbed to death. "These are unprecedented levels of violence ... also not terribly surprising given the extreme levels of tension and paranoia," Morayef says.
[Associated
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