Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah released from prison after 12 years following presidential pardon

Pro-democracy Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah is pardoned and released after nearly 12 years in prison.

“An exceptionally kind day. Alaa is free,” his sister Mona Seif writes on social media site X, along with a picture of her brother smiling with his mother Laila Soueif and sister Sanaa Seif.

Sanaa Seif posts on Facebook that her brother arrived at home while they were waiting for him at Wadi Natron Prison outside Cairo.

Abd el-Fattah and five other prisoners had been pardoned after the National Council for Human Rights acted on behalf of their families and urged President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to consider their situations on humanitarian grounds.

He was arrested in 2014 for participating in an unauthorized protest and allegedly assaulting a police officer and was briefly released in 2019 before he was detained again later that year during a security crackdown that followed rare anti-government protests in Egypt.

Abd el-Fattah was one of the most prominent Egyptian activists in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising and his detention became emblematic of the fraying of Egypt’s democracy.

He took part in the 2011 uprising that toppled autocratic former President Hosni Mubarak, and later was active in protests against human rights abuses and military trials of civilians.

He was first sent to prison in 2014 for participating in an unauthorized protest and allegedly assaulting a police officer, before being released in early 2019. He was arrested again in September 2019 during a security crackdown that followed rare anti-government protests in Egypt, and after more than two years in pretrial detention, an emergency security court sentenced him to five years for spreading false news.

When his release date came up in September 2024, authorities refused to count his time in pretrial detention and ordered him held until Jan. 3, 2027.