(HorizonPost.com) – The Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID), Abbas Kamel, recently visited Capitol Hill in June 2021 and made a bold, controversial, and perhaps untimely accusation that the US reneged on a deal made with his home country. The charge centers on Mohamed Soltan, who was arrested in 2013 for his alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood — a group declared a terrorist organization in Egypt — during the unrest after current President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi used the military to depose Mohammed Morsi from the position.
Soltan held dual Egyptian/American citizenship at the time, and his family pleaded with the American government to intervene on his behalf. They said he was falsely imprisoned, having been denied his basic right to a fair trial because, at that time, the fledgling Egyptian government was conducting mass trials, not individual ones. In 2015, el-Sisi agreed to release him — and Kamel insists US counterparts agreed that Soltan would serve out his term of life in prison in an American facility. Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) was an undersecretary in the State Department at the time and refuted the assertion, calling it “a bald-faced lie.”
As a US official, I was involved in the effort to free our citizen Mohamed Soltan from an Egyptian prison/torture chamber.
The Egyptian claim that we promised to jail him in the US are a bald-faced lie. They deserve to have their aid cut just for this.https://t.co/o3QaWS6PoY
— Tom Malinowski (@Malinowski) July 12, 2021
It’s unclear why a representative of the Middle Eastern country would make this claim at this time; it’s done nothing but provide ammunition to the Progressives in Congress to cut $300 million from the roughly $1.3 billion in aid slated for his country. Critics accuse President Joe Biden’s administration of backpedaling on its promise to make human rights around the world a centerpiece by agreeing to send this much money to a country that organizations like Amnesty International paint as one of the most oppressive in the world.
Copyright 2021, HorizonPost.com
