8 Aug 2019; MEMO: Doha Badie, daughter of the Supreme Guide of Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Badie, said yesterday that her 76-year-old father sleeps on the ground in his cell in an Egyptian prison, the Anadolu Agency reported.
On Facebook, Doha noted that her father turned 76 and has spent 19 years in jail, both since the coup and during the reign of President Anwar Sadat.
“This year is different,” Doha wrote, “I am unable to say happy birthday to you as I am unable to see you even through a glass cage that blurs vision and distorts sound.”
She also noted that in the light of the ban on family visits, no news sites had reported on her father and she did not know whether the money sent to him in prison, to allow him to purchase his medication, had reached him. The family had no details of the condition of his health.
The only news which they have been given, Doha said, is that her father “is locked up in solitary confinement and sleeps on the ground in an empty cell.”
“I hope that you are healthy and that you are freed before the end of this year,” she wrote.
No comment was obtained from the Egyptian authorities.
Badie is a prominent Egyptian academic who was born on 7 August 1943 and joined the Brotherhood in 1959. He became the Supreme Guide in 2010.
After the military coup, which ousted the country’s first democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, Badie was sent to prison and the Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed.
