Many people will be aware of the appalling case of Australian journalist Peter Greste, who was arrested in Cairo on 29 December 2013 and charged with assisting a terrorist organisation. Peter was in the city on assignment with two colleagues from Al Jazeera English, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Baher Mohamed. Nearly six months later, they were found guilty after a thoroughly questionable trial and were sentenced to seven years in gaol.
The following January, the Egyptian authorities caved in to the global outrage and announced that the three journalists would be going to a retrial. Within a month, Peter was deported to Cyprus, but the two others remained in prison for a further eleven days.
Peter isn’t the only Australian to be arrested on completely spurious charges in the Egyptian capital. It also happened to me and two of my associates when I visited Cairo in late November 2016 to deliver the keynote address at the annual conference of the Egyptian Orthopaedic Association.
I’ll put my cards on the table right now: Cairo isn’t one of my favourite places. It’s dusty and absolutely chaotic. Parts of the city look like a construction site, because there are many half-finished buildings that were obviously abandoned when the money ran out. I disliked every moment I was in the city.
I was there with my partner and colleague Claudia and my surgical Fellow Solon Rosenblatt, from the University of California, San Francisco. Solon’s an interesting character. He’s Jewish, but he was born in Ankara while his father was serving as a US diplomat in the Turkish capital. He’s also firmly committed to the continued existence of Israel, and he served with the Israeli Army in the Yom Kippur War—fighting against Egypt and Syria. So there was always going to be the potential for some tension in Egypt.
I had a sense of foreboding from the moment we landed at Cairo International Airport. There was no air bridge. Instead, we had to board one of the two massively overcrowded buses that had been allocated to take the planeload of passengers across the tarmac.
As I waited for Solon and Claudia inside the terminal, I became aware that two huge queues were forming—one for immigration clearance, and the other at a foreign exchange desk. We were met by a driver who’d been sent by the conference organisers. Somehow, he’d managed to cross the passport checking area and was waiting for us when we arrived at the terminal.
The driver knew the standard procedures and told us to first join the queue heading to the foreign exchange desk. The instruction was that we should pay the cashier and he would hand over a visa. I’d never heard of buying a visa at a foreign exchange desk in the airport before.
After we’d been to the foreign exchange desk, I approached a female customs officer at her station. She appeared to be in her mid- to late thirties. There were a couple of stripes on the arm of her uniform. As she flicked through my passport, in broken English she demanded aggressively, ‘What are you doing here?’
In English, I answered that I was there to speak at a conference. It was clear that she didn’t understand what I was saying, and again she roared, ‘Why do you come here?’
Our driver had been standing between the officer and me, leaning with an elbow on a bench. At this point, he intervened and responded in Arabic, saying, ‘Let him pass.’ Reluctantly, our female inquisitor stamped out passports and allowed us through. But as a final act of disdain, instead of handing us our passports, she roughly hurled them back in our general direction, leaving us to gather them up and restore some semblance of order to our documents. It was an even more hostile reception than many travellers—particularly Muslims and Arabs—receive at American airports!
As we emerged from the terminal, we were bombarded by cab drivers desperately trying to lure us into their cars. In the end, our driver navigated us through the hassling cabbies and drove to the InterContinental hotel where the orthopaedic conference was being held.
At reception, we were told that the hotel could provide a Mercedes and a driver to take us on a sightseeing tour of Cairo. It was around four o’clock in the afternoon, and things were about to go seriously awry.
Different rules apply to the vehicles and the roads in Cairo. From the outset, I was convinced that Egyptian cars aren’t fitted with brakes—instead, the drivers use the horn to alert everyone else to get out of their way!
The main road into the city is marked for three lanes of traffic in each direction. But Cairo’s drivers completely ignore the markings. Instead of three lanes of traffic on either side of the road, there are six! I asked our driver what was the point of the road markings. ‘They’re just for decoration,’ he responded.
We came across only two sets of traffic lights all the time we were in the city. Both were red when we approached them—so, not unnaturally, the driver stopped. This sparked outrage from other motorists. As we slowed to a halt, a cacophony of horns started blaring, demanding our driver should accelerate through the lights.
Before long, we drove past a beautifully decorated palace. We stopped the car and climbed out to take photos, as almost any tourist would. Then we spotted an ornate Coptic church the size of a small mosque. Despite its beauty, we weren’t inclined to take photographs.
The sightseeing expedition went rapidly downhill from there. As we drove across a bridge over the River Nile, we saw the spectacular St Mark’s Coptic Cathedral, about 4 kilometres to our left. It’s the centre of the Coptic Christian faith and is attached to the Church of St Peter and St Paul.
I tried to take a photo on my phone while Claudia, in the back, went to take a picture on her new Nikon camera. As she aimed the lens, a beaten-up white Hyundai sped past. The car’s passenger—ominously dressed in a black jumper and black pants—leaned out of the window and started yelling in Arabic, ‘Pull over, pull over—you’re not allowed to take photographs.’
Our driver—a short man in a white shirt and blue tie, with his gut hanging over the top of his grey suit pants—and I weren’t about to follow the instruction. Who knows what we would have been letting ourselves in for? But the man in black was so assertive and insistent that we did eventually follow the Hyundai and steer onto an exit from the bridge.
The passenger from the Hyundai—who we quickly realised was actually wearing a police uniform—clambered out and came to the driver’s door. ‘Give me your driver’s licence,’ he gruffly ordered. Our driver obliged.
Then the man in black walked around to the front passenger side of our car, where Solon was sitting. He knocked on the window and insisted it should be wound down. ‘Give me your passport,’ he instructed. Solon complied—and the man walked away with the document in his back pocket.
Now, this would have been uncomfortable for any of us. For Solon, however, it was particularly intimidating because of his military record back in 1967, when Israel launched air strikes on Egyptian military bases and sent tanks and troops rolling across the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula.
The passenger from the Hyundai then approached the back window where Claudia was sitting. She was so terrified by the events that she froze and wouldn’t open the window when he barked the order at her. I had to lean over and lower the window. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked aggressively.
‘Australia.’
‘I want to see your passports.’
‘We don’t have them. They’re back at the hotel,’ I responded.
‘Give me the camera,’ he instructed, looking in Claudia’s direction.
She handed it to him without hesitation and he walked away to his vehicle. Maybe the camera was the prize he was after, we speculated. If that was the case, it would be a cheap price to pay.
The immediate problem, though, was that the Hyundai passenger was still holding our driver’s licence and Solon’s passport, which was sticking out of the back pocket of the policeman’s pants.
Quickly, as the cop moved to walk from our car towards the police vehicle, with admirable sleight of hand, Solon picked his pocket, snatching the passport.
The policeman climbed back into the passenger seat of the Hyundai, then the car sped away. Our driver followed, ducking and weaving through the teeming traffic in hot pursuit.
I’d been holding the other two passports in my jacket pocket and, as we were driving, handed them to Claudia and said, ‘Hide these.’
After about five minutes, the white car screeched into what looked like a junkyard beneath the bridge. The surroundings appeared threatening. The yard was a patch of dirt around 50 metres square, with a shed in one corner. Around the yard, about 30 men—every one of them rough and physically intimidating—were lurking.
Once we’d come to a halt, the driver and I climbed out of the car. We were ushered into the shed. Solon got out separately.
Claudia, who by now was alone in our car, was terrified and locked all the doors to protect herself. The rough guys who’d been hanging around in the yard moved towards the Mercedes, slowly crowding around the vehicle with their eyes fixed on Claudia. She felt her safety was hanging by a thread and also was convinced the driver and I were about to be bashed within the confines of the shed.
Fortunately, the only assault we faced was verbal. We were berated and informed that what we thought was a junkyard was actually a police station!
Inside, to my surprise, there were rooms with desks and chairs. I managed to find the Hyundai passenger, who turned out to be a police lieutenant, standing in front of a colonel.
The lieutenant was pointing to the camera and, in Arabic, explaining to the colonel that we were taking photos. I intervened and asked the colonel, ‘Can I have the driver’s licence and the camera back?’
‘In five minutes,’ he informed me.
The colonel gave the lieutenant a series of instructions and the junior officer left the room. The driver and I followed in his wake.
The lieutenant then informed us we were about to be transferred to a much bigger police station.
‘But why?’ I asked.
‘You’re not allowed to take photographs of the Coptic church,’ came the response. To this day, considering we were a few kilometres from the building, I still find this puzzling. For the life of me, I have no idea why photos of the church were forbidden.
After clambering back into the Mercedes, we were ordered to follow the Hyundai. We complied. But as we drove to our new destination, I asked Claudia to search for the phone number of the Australian High Commission in Cairo. I called the number and, with a sense of relief, managed to talk to an Australian official. The conversation didn’t unfold as I expected—and it reflected the awful state of the police and justice system in Egypt.
I explained to the Australian woman on the phone that we had been arrested in Cairo.
‘What did you do?’ she asked.
‘We were trying to take a photo of a Coptic church.’
‘Well, that was pretty stupid. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to take photos in Cairo?’
‘Okay, but what should we do? We need your help.’
‘The best thing you can do is pay them off,’ I was told.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Call us back if you’re still being held at the police station in 24 hours.’
We followed the Hyundai to the imposing Shoubra Police Station—a massive facility on the east side of the Nile, which has become one of the symbols of police brutality in Egypt. It’s protected by a 10-metre high wall. There are towers on the four corners, each staffed by a police officer armed with a powerful machine gun.
The Hyundai and our Mercedes pulled up at the huge black gates that form the front entrance. Our driver climbed out—and, as he did, another black Mercedes with a driver dressed in the same uniform arrived. The second Mercedes driver—who had been sent by the hotel—also got out to check what was going on.
Claudia saw this as a potential escape route. ‘I want to go back to the hotel with the other driver,’ she said, probably more in hope than expectation. To be honest, by this point, none of us was going anywhere unless instructed by our captors.
Claudia’s Plan B was a little more desperate. She had no idea what was going on and shouted, ‘Lock the doors.’ Her uncertainty was soon swept away. A large, heavily armed man dressed in a khaki uniform approached our car. I pointed to his firearm and asked Claudia, ‘Do you know what that is?’
‘A gun?’ she responded.
‘That’s not just a gun,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s an AK47. It doesn’t just kill one person; it’ll kill 50 or 60 at a time! I wouldn’t bother locking the car—if he wants to kill us, he’ll just blast us through the doors. A life in this part of the world is worth no more than the price of the bullets.
‘Oh—and it might help if you could stop shaking!’
That wasn’t going to happen. Claudia’s teeth were chattering with sheer terror. ‘I can’t,’ she blurted out.
By now, Solon had followed the driver out of the car to discuss events with the police officers. This wasn’t likely to achieve much, because Solon doesn’t speak Arabic. But I guess it made him feel as though he might have some influence on our fate.
The driver returned, and I inquired, ‘Can Claudia go back to the hotel in the other car?’ I had to ask the question, but didn’t expect a positive response.
‘No,’ the driver announced emphatically. ‘No one can leave. We have to drive into the police compound.’
I stayed in the car with Claudia while a bunch of policemen in dirty clothes dragged their AK47s with the nozzles on the ground and circled our Mercedes.
The black gates opened, and we drove in as instructed. Our driver steered the car to the right and parked. By this stage, we’d already been detained for around two hours, without having any idea how long the ordeal was going to last. The uncertainty was particularly frightening.
We tumbled out of the car, walked further to the right and entered the ground floor of the police offices. Inside, it was impossibly gloomy and dirty. But the cells in front of us were clearly visible. Glancing at my companions, I could tell we all had a deep sense of fear that we might end up in those very same cells.
We turned right and right again, bringing us to a dreary staircase that reminded me of the stories of Charles Dickens during the dark ages of the London slums, with small brown tiles on the steps and walls. We climbed the stairs and, with tension rising, walked down a long corridor, accompanied by three policemen in the same black outfits as the passenger in the Hyundai. One sported three stars on his shoulders while the other had one star and two bars. Clearly, these were more senior officers.
At the end of the corridor, we walked into an office dominated by a huge dark brown desk and two dark brown Chesterfield sofas pressed against the walls, facing the desk. Alongside, two occasional chairs were facing each other. There was a window on the left-hand side.
One unusual aspect of the office was that there were no computers. It confirmed the rumours I had heard that Egyptians are paranoid about Israel hacking into their technology. Their answer? Don’t use computers!
The decision worked in our favour. A quick check of Solon’s online presence would have unveiled his Facebook page, which boldly displayed an image of Solon sitting on a captured Egyptian surface-to-air missile in the Sinai Desert during the October War in 1973. He was fighting with the Israeli Army—a fact which would have placed in even more serious strife.
Sitting behind the desk was a police officer: a lieutenant colonel. Five other police officers were in the room with him. To the right of the lieutenant colonel’s desk were three grey old-style telephones—with his mobile phone alongside. The phones were ringing constantly, and the senior policeman was forever barking instructions in Arabic into one of the mouthpieces. Solon and I chose to stand.
When the phones finally fell silent, the lieutenant colonel rose to his feet—revealing that his formal shoes had been left beneath the desk. He was wearing a pair of black Nike slide thongs. With socks. Not the most flattering fashion statement.
He walked around to the front of his desk. I addressed him straight away, telling him that the officer who’d arrested us was an idiot. My fear was that we’d been reported to National Security. That could mean we’d follow the same path as Peter Greste—being held in gaol until the Australian authorities were informed, and then becoming the subject of protracted diplomatic negotiations, largely designed as a show of strength by the Egyptian Government. We would have been particularly valuable captives—especially if the officers had found out that Solon’s an Israeli citizen and I’m in the RAAF Reserve.
But finally, things started to turn in our favour. Almost immediately, the lieutenant colonel began shouting at the arresting officer, telling him he was a fool. The other police joined in, reinforcing his junior status and incompetence. I was pacing up and down, venting my frustrations at our treatment.
I then pointed to Claudia and exclaimed, ‘This woman is sitting on your sofa shaking. She’s done nothing wrong. How can you threaten perfectly innocent people like this?’ The lieutenant colonel tried to placate me and urged me to sit down.
At that point, a general walked in. The lieutenant colonel stood aside and ushered his superior officer into the chair behind the desk.
The general started talking to the other officer in Arabic, saying, ‘We should try to sort this out here and now rather than transferring it to the National Security Headquarters,’ he urged.
I intervened, introduced myself and explained why we were visiting Cairo, and asked the general to help us.
Solon adopted a different approach, attempting to defuse the situation by putting his arm around the general’s shoulder and saying reassuringly, ‘Let’s sort this out over a coffee.’
I wasn’t entirely sure whether the softly-softly approach would be successful. But the police seemed to understand the word coffee and summoned an attendant who, in a matter of minutes, produced a tray of small cups of short, intense Turkish coffee.
There was a moment of distraction when the general picked up one of the phones on the desk. Claudia asked me in a faint and exhausted voice, ‘Can you tell me what’s going on?’
I explained what I’d overheard from the conversations in Arabic between the police officials. ‘The guy who stopped us called National Security and told them we were spies,’ I told Claudia and Solon. ‘But now, everything seems to be okay. All the other people appear to be on our side. They’re trying to release us. But they have to get clearance from National Security.’
The general ordered the arresting lieutenant, the passenger in the Hyundai, to leave. The junior officer saluted and walked out of the room with his head bowed. After a dressing-down by the general and the other officers, he’d been sent home for failing to follow the standard reporting process. Instead of referring the case to his commanding officer, he’d jumped the gun and straight away reported the incident to National Security.
The police then called our hotel to check our credentials and establish that we were legitimate delegates at the conference. The conference organiser delivered the confirmation over the phone and arranged for a representative of the Ministry of Health to speak to the general face to face. Which was fine and dandy—except that it meant we had to be cooped up in the grim surroundings of the police station for another hour or more.
Eventually, the Ministry of Health official arrived, wearing a brown suit—everything that day seemed to be one shade of brown or another. He announced, ‘This must be a mix-up. This is a professor from Australia who’s a keynote speaker at our conference.’
In the meantime, there had been several phone calls with what seems to be the duty officer at the National Security Headquarters and they were awaiting the decision about our fate from their chain of command. We ended up staying in the police station for two more hours before we received the final phone call from National Security Headquarters. The general passed the message to me that we were cleared to go. But first the paperwork must be finalised. That was a big relief.
The general started dictating to a junior officer who was writing a statement on a pad of lined paper, outlining events and saying, ‘We searched their person. We searched their cameras. And found no evidence that they were spies.’
They hadn’t carried out any of those inspections, of course. So, essentially, the police faked it! I had to sign the statement. But to make sure there could be no evidence against us, I signed with my mother’s name.
During the proceedings, the police had given Claudia a carton of ridiculously sweet apple juice, which she had avoided drinking. Now, they started laughing and joking and said to her, ‘You have to drink the juice or we won’t let you go!’ It was a price she was happy to pay. Before we left, Claudia’s camera was returned.
To be honest, I think the factor that had protected us was that I’d be invited to the conference by the Egyptian Ministry of Health. The head of the department might well have played a part in achieving our release.
By the time we were freed, it was around 8.30 p.m. and dark. But, despite the dramas, we resumed our sightseeing excursion. I asked the driver to avoid Tahrir Square—which had been the centre of the mass demonstrations during the Arab Spring of 2011.
Obviously, he didn’t listen. Fifteen minutes later, we ended up there!
As well as giving us a summary of the significance of the demonstrations, the driver also made a point of gratuitously informing us: ‘This is the place where the CBS journalist Lara Logan was sexually assaulted.’
On a much more pleasant note, we also went to the River Nile, where we walked along a couple of boats.
During the sightseeing tour, my phone rang and, after a brief conversation, I told the others, ‘We have to go back.’
Claudia immediately thought the worst. ‘What, to the police station?’
‘No,’ I reassured her. ‘To the hotel!’
When we arrived, we received a huge welcome from the hotel and conference officials—along with a massive bunch of flowers for Claudia.
I believe we were the victims of the innate suspicion of foreigners, who are broadly regarded by the Egyptian authorities as spies or potential spies. The mood of insecurity followed the fragmentation of Egyptian politics that started with the Arab Spring uprisings.
After massive street demonstrations lasting eighteen days, long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down and cede power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Elections were held and won by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which installed Mohamed Morsi as president in mid-2012.
Morsi followed his beliefs and attempted to introduce an Islamic constitution—as well as trying to write into law unparalleled presidential powers. The country again dissolved into mass protests and general turmoil. To resolve the crisis, the Egyptian military staged a coup in mid-2013 and installed army chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the country’s leader. The following year, el-Sisi resigned from the military and was elected as Egypt’s president, apparently with the support of 97 per cent of voters.
The day after the ‘spying’ incident, I was due to address the conference—but even that didn’t run smoothly. We had decided to visit the pyramids on the morning of my talk, which was a reasonable enough proposition as they’re not far out of the city. We were driven there in around 45 minutes.
We reached the pyramids to be greeted—not unexpectedly—by a throng of tour guides and dozens of kids trying to sell us cheap souvenirs.
As happens in these places, on the tour inside the pyramid, we were deluged with signs saying ‘No Cameras’. The observation sounded ironically familiar by this stage! But the guide was less vigilant than the Cairo police—the instruction was overlooked after the payment of a small gratuity.
The journey back to the conference centre wasn’t as straightforward as the journey to the pyramids—it took no less than four hours! It was just a sea of cars all the way. The massive traffic snarl was so bad that, a couple of kilometres from the conference venue, we abandoned the vehicle and walked the rest of the journey.
We were way behind schedule, and there was no opportunity to get changed. So I walked up to the microphone in front of a packed audience dressed in the T-shirt and blazer I’d been wearing for the casual visit to the pyramids. It was not an auspicious start. More misadventures were to come, though. When I was welcomed to the stage by the chair of the session, he introduced me as ‘Munjed the spy’!
Halfway through my talk, the Egyptian minister of health and his entourage walked in. As soon as he was spotted, the audience stood and applauded, completely drowning out my address. I had no alternative—I simply had to stop while the minister took his place on the stage.
This wasn’t a quick process. The minister wasn’t about to cut short his moment of glory, and he milked the occasion for all it was worth. He ambled through the audience, greeting friends and acquaintances along the way. Then he slowly strolled onto the stage, walked behind me as I stood speechless at the microphone and joined the panel members sitting to one side. He made a point of kissing each of them in turn. Only when he took his seat did the applause die down, allowing me to resume my talk.
I’d never experienced anything like that before—or, for that matter, since. On reflection, if the minister had indeed played a part in securing our release from custody then I don’t resent his moment of glory.
The postscript to our brush with Egypt’s security forces came three weeks later, in December 2016. During Sunday mass, a suicide bomber detonated a 12-kilogram IED in the Church of St Peter and St Paul, next to the Coptic cathedral that we’d been photographing. A total of 25 people died in the bombing, mainly women and children. Another 49 were wounded.
The attack was roundly condemned by the Grand Mufti of Egypt—the country’s most senior official of Islamic law—along with Coptic church leaders, Roman Catholic Pope Francis and even the militant Islamic group Harakat Sawa’d Misr, also known as the Hasam Movement and regarded by some countries, including Egypt, as a terrorist organisation. Hundreds of Coptic Christians and Muslims joined together in protest outside the church, chanting slogans against the perpetrators of the slaughter.