Christian Advocacy Now

This month we are joining Amnesty International and others around the globe in calling for the immediate and unconditional release of this young photojournalist, whose only crime was recording the truth. Use the letter below—feeling free to personalize—as you urge the public prosecutor to drop the charges against Shawkan.

Write a letter!

Nabil Sadek
Office of the Public Prosecutor
Madinat Al-Rihab
New Cairo
Egypt

Dear Counsellor Nabil Sadek,

I urge you to release Mahmoud Abu Zeid, better known as Shawkan, immediately and unconditionally with all charges against him dropped. He is a prisoner of conscience, detained solely for his journalistic work. A photojournalist, he was covering a sit-in on 14 August 2013 in Cairo, when security forces swept in. Police and army officers were deployed to disperse the Rabaa al-Adaweya sit-in, which Shawkan was photographing. It was Egypt’s darkest day, resulting in the killing of more than 700 people from the Rabaa al-Adaweya sit-in alone. Up to 1,000 people were killed across the country. When police found out Shawkan was a journalist, they arrested him. They beat him with a belt and their fists, and tied his wrists so tightly with a plastic ligature they bled, he has told Amnesty International in a letter published in April 2015. A few days later, when he was being transferred to a prison, he was kept in a parked truck for several hours under sweltering summer heat. He has been in detention for more than three years facing trumped-up charges and receiving inadequate health care. Please release him without delay.

Yours sincerely,