First Lieutenant Karim Naguib of the first suburb of the Nasr City police station was suspended from active duty after he and brother attempted to abduct a woman walking on the street in Nasr City, according to the Ministry of Interior’s media office.
The ministry’s statement indicated that the Minister of Interior Magdy Abdul Ghafar decided to relegate Naguib to the Police Reserve forces. The officer and his brother were arrested and were referred to public prosecution.
Five years after the 25 January Revolution, there continue to be abuses of police authority that have led to a string of arbitrary arrests, torture, and deaths in police stations, as documented by human rights groups. Over the past year, several policemen have been detained for violence against prisoners and some have been sentenced to prison terms.
Abdel Ghaffar recently made a police officer publically apologise to the family of a truck driver whom the officer killed with his service weapon in Cairo last week.
In the highly publicised death of Italian national and Cambridge Phd student Giulio Regeni, Abdel Ghaffar recently pledged that Egyptian authorities were exerting concentrated efforts to reveal the circumstances of the “mysterious” death of the researcher.
The body of Regeni, who disappeared on 25 January, was found bearing signs of torture on February 3, in a ditch along the Cairo-Alexandria motorway.
Italian media have accused Egyptian security forces of being involved in his death, a charge that the government in Cairo has dismissed.
However, Prime Minister Sherif Ismail has admitted that the image of the police in the eyes of Egyptians needs to be “transformed”.
