Mother on hunger strike for jailed activist son hopes she doesn't die before he's freed

Laila Soueif tells Tom Watling that David Lammy has failed to help her son despite spending years calling for his release

- Tom Watling

The mother of a jailed British-Egyptian activist has not had a meal for close to a month – a hunger strike that she hopes will lead to her son’s release before she starves to death. Laila Soueif, a 68-year-old maths professor born in London but who now lives in Cairo, is in the UK to call for Alaa Abdel Fattah’s release.

Fattah, 42, is one of Egypt’s most prominent pro-democracy voices and has spent much of the last decade in prison. In 2021, he was charged with spreading false news for sharing a Facebook post about torture in Egypt, having already spent more than two years in pretrial detention. He had also already served five years on similar charges between 2014 and 2019. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have decried the charges and called his trials a sham.

His mother has been on hunger strike since a day after Fattah’s second five-year sentence ended on 29 September without his release. The Egyptian government has justified keeping Mr Fattah in prison by claiming his pre-trial detention does not count towards his time served.

“I hope I won’t die in this attempt,” says Soueif during a sit down with The Independent, her daughter Sanaa Seif and Fattah’s cousin, Omar Robert Hamilton.