U.S. Copts Association

New Christian still suffers from security police torture.

June 21 (Compass) — Five months after he was forcibly committed to a mental hospital for converting from Islam to Christianity, Gasir Mohammed Mahmoud has been discharged from his locked psychiatric ward in Cairo and set free.

Mahmoud was released June 9 from Cairo’s El-Khanka Hospital for Mental and Neurological Health, where two police officers from his home city of Suez had institutionalized him last January.

Mahmoud, now 31, told Compass last week that the doctor who discharged him called his adoptive mother and asked her to come and collect him from the hospital.

“But she told me not to return to Suez,” Mahmoud said, warning him that he would face problems there, both from his father and the state security police.

Parents Alarmed at Son’s Conversion

Adopted as an infant, Mahmoud was raised by the Muslim couple, who were alarmed last December to learn that he had converted to Christianity two years earlier. But his father’s angry appeal to local Muslim sheikhs prompted them to issue death threats against the son for committing apostasy.

After his mother asked local state security police to protect her son from being killed, they subjected Mahmoud to an endless round of interrogations and arrests.

Initially, Mahmoud said, he was questioned “in a decent way” in front of a state security officer named Mohammed Amar. He was then transferred to another official who brought two Muslim sheikhs to talk with him, trying to convince him to return to Islam. After eight days’ detention, eating only food that other detainees shared with him, he was sent to the Suez Security Directorate for an investigation that lasted four days.

Then he was released. Because his only Bible had been destroyed, he stopped at an evangelical church on his way home to ask for another copy. “But they were afraid,” Mahmoud said, “and refused to give me a Bible.”
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