Hundreds Vanishing in Egypt as Crackdown Widens, Activists Say

After the security forces raided the home of Islam Khalil, a 26-year-old salesman, last summer, he seemed to vanish without a trace.

Mr. Khalil, who lives about 50 miles north of Cairo in El Santa, Egypt, had not been formally arrested, so his family could not determine where he was being held, or by whom. His relatives, who said he did not have access to a lawyer, worried that he was dead.

When Mr. Khalil finally emerged, four months later, at a police station in the port city of Alexandria, Egypt, he looked dirty and emaciated, according to his brother Nour, and reported that interrogators had suspended him from his arms and his legs, and administered electric shocks to him, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

“He didn’t look like the Islam I know,” Nour Khalil recalled in a recent interview.

Mr. Khalil is one of hundreds of Egyptians who have recently been subjected to what human rights groups call “enforced disappearance,” a harsh tactic that has become increasingly prevalent in Egypt as the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi widens its crackdown on opponents, real or imagined.

Instead of being held in the formal legal system — where tens of thousands of people have been detained under Mr. Sisi — people like Mr. Khalil have disappeared into a network of secretive detention centers, run by the security forces, where they are held incommunicado, without charge or access to a lawyer, for weeks and sometimes months, according to the rights groups.

There, interrogators use the detainee’s isolation and lack of legal protections to interrogate them harshly. Some have been forced to open their Facebook pages, and other social media sites, to identify friends and relatives. Many say they have been tortured.

The detainees are usually released within months or, like Mr. Khalil, charged with a crime — usually membership in the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, the accusation Mr. Sisi’s government lays against many of its opponents. But others stay missing much longer, such as the political activist Ashraf Shehata, who disappeared in January 2014. And some turn up dead, their bodies dumped in morgues.

Nasser Amin, a lawyer with the state-funded National Council on Human Rights, said the situation was far more stark now than during the nearly three-decade rule of President Hosni Mubarak, when human rights activists generally could locate detainees within 24 hours and visit them within 15 days.

“This is an unprecedented catastrophe for human rights and freedoms in Egypt,” he said.

The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an advocacy group based in Cairo, said it had documented 340 cases of enforced disappearances, 11 of them involving minors, from August to November. Last summer, the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances said it had referred the cases of 66 people to Mr. Sisi’s government for urgent action.

The disappeared include members of the Muslim Brotherhood but also civil society activists, journalists and members of the public who unwittingly become caught in the state security dragnet. “The goal seems to be to terrorize society, to show that anyone who dares criticize the government will face a similar fate,” said Mohamed Elmissiry, a researcher with Amnesty International.

Some activists fear they could fall prey to the phenomenon they are documenting. On Jan. 10, for example, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms said that plainclothes security agents had tried to abduct one of its board members, Ahmed Abdullah, even though he faces no criminal charges.

Last July security officials picked up Attef Farrag, a businessman and a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, and his son Yehia, who relatives say was not politically active, from their home in Cairo. “I thought they were going to kill us all,” said his wife, wiping away tears as she described the raid.

After months of silence, the two men reappeared in early January, when they contacted their family from Tora prison just outside Cairo.

“There is no justice,” said Mariam, Mr. Farrag’s 17-year-old daughter. “We only expect to see them in our dreams.”