Egypt probes death of jailed US citizen, as Washington slams ‘avoidable’ death
- Mustafa Kassem died after he staged a hunger strike to protest what he insisted was wrongful imprisonment in Cairo
- The case trains a spotlight on dangers of Egyptian prisons, where many inmates are serving time for crimes they insist they did not commit
Egypt on Tuesday said it would investigate the death in custody of a US citizen who had gone on a hunger strike as part of a six-year battle against what he insisted was wrongful imprisonment.
Mustafa Kassem, 54, an Egyptian-born auto parts dealer from Long Island, New York, died late on Monday of heart failure after a hunger strike he began last year, his lawyers said.
He had been in Cairo in August 2013 when he was rounded up by police amid a deadly crackdown on an Islamist sit-in in the Egyptian capital.
Kassem was stopped by security forces outside a shopping centre where he was exchanging dollars. He showed his US passport to the soldiers who were enraged and began beating him up, according to his brother-in-law in a New York Times report published in October 2018.
