The Prison Has a Priest. The 106 Christians Inside Have Not Had a Mass in Months.
The document is polite. That is the first thing to understand about it.
A Cairo lawyer named Said Fayez addressed a public appeal to officials of Egypt’s National Security Agency. It does not protest anyone’s innocence. It does not denounce the state. It asks for one thing, a thing Egypt’s own prison regulations already guarantee: that Christian prisoners at Rehabilitation Prison No. 6, in the Tenth of Ramadan Correctional Complex, be allowed to attend a Mass and see a priest for confession. A priest is assigned to the complex. The appeal says the Christian detainees have gone months without seeing him.
Then, almost in passing, the appeal states the number. There are approximately 106 or 107 Christian detainees in that one prison. Nearly all of them, it says, face the same two charges: joining a terrorist organization, and spreading false news. Some have been inside two months. Some a year. Some longer.
One hundred and six Christians. One prison. One pair of charges. Coptic Solidarity, which surfaced the appeal, asked the question that matters: are these men part of one case, or a hundred separate ones? No one has answered. But we know what the inside of that complex is like, because one of its prisoners has been documented in detail.
