Saved By Twitter: Detained In An Egyptian Jail

That morning, the state security forces and military forces infiltrated the factory and shut down the strike ahead of time. Discontent from that spilled out into the street and that, combined with stress and fear of rising food prices, erupted into rioting which continued into the following night.

This was a true people’s revolt – there wasn't a lot of looting or fighting; I saw people lighting tires in the street or starting small fires or throwing rocks at police, but mostly they were chanting against the government, which is very unusual in Egypt.

By the third day, police had arrested and rounded up a lot of people – not just people who were participating in the riots, but people who were sitting in cafes or walking home from school, as preventative measures to quiet the town and silence the rioting. Around 300 people had been detained and many without being on the books so there was no record of where they were. Many of them were young men in their teens and even younger.

This created a third element, in that the families of the detained were getting increasingly worried about their family members and started small protests outside the prison.

On April 10, I was taking photos of the families trying to get information about their detained family members when I was kidnapped by security forces. It wasn’t an arrest like, “I’m a police officer and I need to take you in for such-and-such a reason.” I was grabbed, all of a sudden, from the middle of the crowd, along with my translator Mohammad. The crowd actually tried to get us out of there by pushing us into a cab to get away.