The alleged torture of four Indonesian students, who were mistakenly arrested last week by the Egyptian police is "excessive and unjustifiable", a lawmaker and a Muslim scholar said Sunday. "If it is true, and it is likely true, the government should protest stridently and demand an apology from the Egyptian government, and ask them to take action against the security officials who are responsible for the torture," a lawmaker from the National Mandate Party (PAN), Abdillah Toha, was quoted as saying by Antara news agency. The four students were arrested during a raid on June 28 after being suspected of being involved in extremist activities. They claimed to have been stripped naked, electrocuted and beaten while being interrogated in detention, Antara reported. Detik.com reported the Egyptian police were searching for Ismail Nasution, an Indonesian student who visited the website of the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned organization in Egypt, and was allegedly involved in a terrorist network. "What they did was excessive," Muslim scholar Azyumardi Azra told The Jakarta Post on Sunday. "The perpetrators should be brought to court. This is unjustifiable." The Foreign Ministry had sent a letter to the Egyptian government to seek clarification for the incident. The embassy officials had also requested a meeting with the authorities in Cairo to ask for assurance about the safety of thousands of Indonesian students there. Ministry spokesperson Teuku Faizasyah said the embassy had told them to focus on their studies and be more careful in engaging in any non-academic activities in the country, which is still under a state of emergency. "But as it happens here, they always have many chances to interact more with their surroundings, and we can't always monitor them." Egypt has been under a state of emergency after the assassination of the then president Anwar Sadat in 1981. Human Rights Watch has blasted Egypt's decision to prolong its Emergency Law, saying it is often misused by the government to silence political dissenters. The country has recently made major arrests on several activists from the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition group whose members have been actively involved in social and political activities despite its being outlawed for decades. Abdillah asked the students to be more careful in Egypt, which he accused of being an authoritarian country that did not respect human rights. Azra, meanwhile, likened the current political situation in Egypt, which will host the Non-aligned Summit Meeting this month, with that of Indonesia under the iron-fisted Soeharto administration.
Author: The Jakarta Post
Author: The Jakarta Post
