CAIRO
The daughter of a member of ousted President Mohamed Morsi's presidential team has expressed fears over her father's health, saying Egypt's interim rulers can do anything to extract information from him.
"The people who kill peaceful demonstrators in cold blood will not find it difficult to harm my father to extract information from him or force him into specific confessions," Aisha Essam al-Haddad, the elder daughter of Morsi's foreign affairs advisor, told Anadolu Agency Wednesday.
"We have not been able to communicate with him for over a month now. We do not know anything about him." Al-Haddad was detained by the authorities following Morsi's ouster by the powerful army on 3 July in what the Muslim Brotherhood describes as a military coup, while the unseated president's opponents describe as a military-backed popular uprising.
The families of the detained presidential team complain that they do not know the whereabouts of their relatives. Aisha says this is not the first time her father was detained. "This, however, happened under a dictatorial regime," Aisha said, referring to the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.
"We were hoping that things will change after the revolution." Haddad, also a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was Morsi's point of contact with the outside world. Some people used to describe him as the behind the curtains engineer of Egypt's foreign relations during Morsi's one year in office. "This might be my last message, but I have to say that I see a full-fledged military coup in front of me," Haddad wrote in his last comment on his Twitter account.
Aisha came to Egypt's Bar Association in central Cairo today along with the relatives of other presidential team members to make their voice heard. "Sisi, traitor, Adly Mansour, traitor," shouted Morsi's supporters in their criticism of Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and interim President Adly Mansour.
The father of another Morsi aide said his son did not commit any crime to be taken to an undisclosed jail. "My son did not even receive a salary for the services he offered in the presidency," the father of Ayman Aly, an aide of Morsi for the affairs of Egyptian expatriates, cried.
"He worked hard only because he wanted this country to be better." Aly, a doctor, lived in Austria before he was given his post. His father says he has medical problems and his detention might cause him health complications. "Where is my son?" the father asked. "Under that legal conditions should he be kidnapped like this?"
Other presidential team family members said their relatives were subjected to a massive smear campaign from local media since the ouster of Morsi, this country's first democratically elected president. "This is against all the principles of human right," said Karima Amin al-Serafi, the daughter of a secretary of the unseated president.
The Bar Association, by far Egypt's largest professional union, said it will form two teams to defend the detained politicians as well as other association members who were also detained following 30 June. The detained members of the association include Essam Sultan, the deputy head of Al-Wasat Party.
Another detained association member is Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a popular Salafist preacher and former presidential hopeful. "All types of legal violations are committed in our country these days," said Abdel-Aziz al-Deriny, a senior Bar Association leader. "This is the first time in years a democratically elected president is put in jail to open the way for unelected people to take his place."
