The mother of the jailed British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has said she will go on hunger strike again at the end of next week if no substantive progress is made to release her son.
Laila Soueif, 68, said: “I know the step will mean I have a week or fortnight left to live.”
She collapsed a fortnight ago after being on hunger strike for 150 days and was admitted to Charing Cross hospital in London. During her hunger strike, which began on 29 September last year, she had consumed only herbal tea, black coffee and rehydration salts.
In hospital doctors warned her she was close to death, while she herself wrote a letter to the Egyptian ambassador in London asking for her daughters to be given permission to take her body back to Cairo to be buried close to her deceased husband.
Soueif said: “I did not, I admit, feel physically close to death but as a scientist I knew since I was told my blood sugar levels were critical, and the nurses told my daughters to try to prevent me sleeping.” In hospital it was agreed by her daughters to put her on a glucose drip and boost her blood sugar levels.
She relented further by agreeing to take 300 calories of food supplements a day to give time for negotiations for her son’s release to start, after a phone call on 28 February to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, by Keir Starmer in which the British prime minister pressed for Fattah’s release. The phone call, one of the family’s main requests, coincided with the fourth day of Soueif’s hospitalisation.
There is still hope that Fattah could be freed as part of a wider amnesty linked to the end of Ramadan on 30 March. He has served more than his five-year sentence, but was not released last September on completion of his sentence because the Egyptian authorities chose to ignore the two years he spent in detention before his case was heard.
Soueif said her condition had stabilised after leaving hospital, but there had been no evidence of progress in the release of her son.
She said: “So I have now written to the prime minister that unless there is dramatic change by 28 March and things are moving, I will go back to the previous hunger strike. I will see my medical team on the 25th to be told the consequences, but I think I know them.”
One of her daughters, Sana’a, said: “My mother looks better since she was released from hospital, but her muscles are so weak and her glucose levels are low.”
She said the level of information being provided by the Foreign Office had dropped off since Starmer’s phone call, and that she would be meeting department officials to inform them of her mother’s decision.
Fattah himself went on hunger strike in prison on 1 February after hearing news of his mother’s hospitalisation. He has been visited twice recently by family members, but says he is determined to show support.
He has been asking for consular access to be given to British diplomats, but Egypt has been stalling on recognising his British citizenship, making visits impossible despite numerous requests for the British ambassador to Egypt to visit him.
Most recently on 26 February, Starmer told MPs: “I will do everything I can, to ensure the release in this case, and that includes phone calls as necessary. I’ve raised it before. I’ll raise it again. We raise it, and will continue to do so. I gave my word to the family that that’s what I’d do. That I will do, and I will.”
