Filmmaker Omar Salah Marei brought before State Security Prosecution after week-long forced disappearance

Nearly a week after being forcibly disappeared, filmmaker and screenwriter Omar Salah Marei was brought before the State Security Prosecution on Saturday. Since Marei’s arrest on Monday, his family, their lawyers and the Cinema Professions Syndicate have petitioned for information about his whereabouts or the reason for his arrest. And while Saturday’s session finally brought some clarity, officials continued to block the family and legal team’s access to the detained filmmaker. At the conclusion of the interrogation on Saturday, the prosecution ordered Marei be held in remand detention pending investigation into charges of “deliberately publishing false news inside the country” in several social media posts, lawyer Khaled Ali told Mada Masr. Ali’s office was appointed by the family to pursue legal action in the case after their repeated attempts to obtain information from Maadi Police Station, the public prosecution and the Interior Ministry yielded no answers. Before Saturday’s session, the defense team submitted a request that they should be notified and allowed to attend any interrogation session with Marei in the event that the filmmaker was brought before the prosecution, the lawyer told Mada Masr. This request was not heeded, however. And the prosecution interrogated Marei without his legal team present. As families of detainees often do while searching for information about their relatives, Marei’s family and the defense team waited outside the prosecution headquarters on Saturday. They asked three times whether the filmmaker had been brought in and received no information in response. At 4:30 pm, the lawyers left. Nora al-Sayed, Marei’s wife, told Mada Masr that she stayed outside the prosecution office until nearly midnight, at which point she left without being told that her husband had been brought before the prosecution. It was only in the early hours of Sunday morning that a prosecution-appointed lawyer notified the legal team that he had attended Marei’s interrogation and relayed the charges and detention order issued against him, she said. Last week, Sayed told Mada Masr that she learned on Monday evening upon returning home that security officers had raided their apartment in Sarayat al-Maadi and arrested Marei. However, those arrested with him and later released could not identify where he had been taken. The post Filmmaker Omar Salah Marei brought before State Security Prosecution after week-long forced disappearance first appeared on Mada Masr .