Laila Soueif: It's a 'miracle' mother of jailed activist is alive on day 245 of hunger strike, family says
The daughter of a 69-year-old woman on hunger strike over her son's imprisonment in Egypt has said it is "a miracle" her mother is still alive.
Laila Soueif is now 245 days into surviving on water and rehydration salts, having begun her hunger strike on 29 September last year - the day after her British-Egyptian son, , was due to be released following a five-year prison sentence.
Laila was admitted to London's St Thomas' hospital on Thursday and amid fears for her life, her daughter Sanaa Soueif today told the past two nights were "really tough".
"It's a miracle mum is alive," she said. "At some point [last night] the blood sugar machine was not reading, but my mum is still conscious. She's holding on."
Activist Mr Fattah has been in prison more or less continuously since 2014 over his role in the pro-democracy Arab Spring protests in 2011.
He was briefly free for six months before being rearrested in 2019 for "disseminating false news" after retweeting a report that said another prisoner had died in custody.
"I need the British government to treat my brother like a hostage," Sanaa said. "There is no legal merit to holding him any longer."
Addressing the fact that the UK and have strong diplomatic ties, she added: "If you can't get your friends to respect your citizens, then what chance do you stand with enemies?"
"It is very frustrating," she said. "I think both governments are finally sensing the urgency, I just hope it's not too late.
"I am updating the Foreign Office every hour, but they're not acting with enough urgency that would save her.
"I'm hearing plans of weeks… We don't have weeks. Keir Starmer needs to act now."
In a letter to Laila, and shared by her family, a doctor warned on Friday that she is at an "immediate risk" of sudden death.
There is also a "clear risk" of "irreversible damage to organs including heart, brain and kidneys" which is "worsening the probability for complications upon future re-feeding," they added.
More from Sky News:
A Foreign Office spokesperson said on Saturday: "We are deeply concerned by Laila's hospitalisation. We remain in regular contact with Laila's family and have checked on her welfare. We are also in contact with the Egyptian authorities.
"We are committed to securing Alaa Abd El-Fattah's release and continue to press for this at the highest levels of the Egyptian government."
Hamish Falconer, minister for the Middle East, "conveyed our deep concerns about the situation in a call with the Egyptian ambassador" on Saturday, the statement added.
"Further engagement at the highest levels of the Egyptian government continues."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Roger Cooper, British journalist jailed for five years in Iran whose sense of mischief kept him sane
Roger Cooper, who has died aged 90, was a British journalist and businessman who was arrested as a spy on a visit to Iran in December 1985 and spent more than five years in prison, under sentence of death. For most of that time he was incarcerated in the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran, often in solitary confinement. Nevertheless, he did not court sympathy when he was finally released: 'I can say that anyone who, like me, was educated in an English public school and served in the ranks of the British Army is quite at home in a Third World prison.' As with the incarceration of Terry Waite and his fellow British hostages in Lebanon over the same period, Cooper's plight became a cause célèbre, with frequent rumblings in the press about the outrageous detention of a British citizen in Iran on apparently non-existent evidence. It was Cooper's misfortune, however, that Mrs Thatcher's government had little room for manoeuvre in lobbying for his release. British-Iranian diplomatic relations had been at a low ebb following the Revolution of 1979 and then, just as they were improving, were further marred by the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Cooper had lived in Iran on and off for 20 years until the Revolution. He was working as sales and marketing manager of McDermott International, a US marine construction company, when he flew to Tehran in 1985 hoping to secure a contract for an oil pipeline. On December 7 he had just left his hotel in a taxi when it was cut up by a BMW Coupé: two men emerged and forced him to get in. 'What happened next seemed a blend of the Keystone Cops and the Theatre of the Absurd,' Cooper recalled. One of the men started berating the other for forgetting to bring a blindfold, until Cooper obligingly suggested that they could procure a bandage from a pharmacy and directed the men, unfamiliar with the local area, to the nearest one. Once blindfolded, he was transported to a prison and interrogated by a man who 'wore a close-fitting white mask over his face, with slits for the eyes… It is an image that has stayed with me ever since, regularly haunting my dreams and occurring in flashbacks during waking hours.' The man told Cooper: 'We know all about your espionage career in Iran, both before and after the Revolution. We know the outline, but there are some details which are very important to us… If you do not co-operate, you will stay here until you do, or until you die.' Cooper protested his innocence over the course of several weeks of interrogation, his captor insisting on remaining anonymous: 'If you ever see my face, even by accident, or even try to see it, I will push this pen in one of your ears and out of the other,' he declared on one occasion, waggling his ballpoint in Cooper's ear to underline his point. Cooper was blindfolded whenever he left his cell, even to walk a few yards to the toilet, which he was permitted to use only three times a day ('unless it's an emergency,' he was told, 'and we don't like emergencies'). In February 1987 Cooper was transferred to the notorious political prison in Evin, 10 miles from Tehran. 'Shouting and cries of pain are often heard,' Cooper recalled, 'only partly drowned out by religious chants and prayer ceremonies played endlessly on a tape recorder in the corridor.' He was ordered to provide his captors with a detailed run-down on key figures in British intelligence; having no knowledge of the subject, he invented a cast of personnel based on characters in the works of Evelyn Waugh, including a Secret Service legend called Colonel Dick Hooker, inspired by Waugh's Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. He amused himself in his cell by composing a poem: 'Brigadier Ritchie-Hook/ Is a character in a book./ My Colonel Dick Hooker/ Should have won me the Booker.' Cooper was told that he would be released if he agreed to share his insights in a television broadcast: 'This is going to be the most interesting programme on television for a long time,' his interrogator told him after the recording. 'You were very good.' The deal was abandoned, however, after his captors came across a report on the broadcast in The Guardian, pointing out that Cooper had been blatantly spoofing. In October 1987 Cooper was taken to the prison courtroom and tried. The judge, who spent most of the trial reading the newspaper, told him: 'As regards the verdict, that is obvious from the start, but it has to be typed out and that can take time.' Cooper was not informed of the outcome of the trial, but his father wrote to him to say that he had read in The Daily Telegraph that he was to be sentenced to death. Having formed a friendship with the prison governor, Cooper eventually prevailed on him to provide details and was told that he had received two sentences: death and 10 years' imprisonment. 'I asked him, 'Which comes first?' He looked puzzled for a moment, then said, 'Ah, I see, yes, a good question. I will recommend that they keep you here for 10 years and then hang you.' I replied: 'Please don't make it the other way round.'' Nevertheless, Cooper was eventually released in April 1991, and in 1994 he published a memoir, Death and Ten Years. 'Like him, his book is eccentric and erudite and very funny,' noted the BBC's John Simpson, an old friend of Cooper's, in the Telegraph. 'But its chief value is as a manual to show how a terrifying experience can be overcome triumphantly… Roger Cooper was not a man whom threats or violence could break. His interrogators had all the power, and he had all the character. Character won.' John Roger Sutherland Cooper was born in London on January 29 1935, the son of James Cooper and his wife Rosaleen, née Graves, who were both doctors. Rosaleen was the sister of the poet and novelist Robert Graves; as Roger recalled, 'Uncle Robert had a good baritone voice, at its best, I thought, singing slightly bawdy songs… to the embarrassment of my rather old-fashioned mother.' Robert Graves would die, by macabre coincidence, on the day his nephew was arrested in Iran in 1985. Roger grew up in Devon and won scholarships to Clifton College and to St John's College, Oxford, where he read modern languages. In 1956 he travelled to Budapest to observe the Hungarian Revolution, and returned with three fellow undergraduates the following year to deliver supplies of penicillin. He experienced his first taste of a foreign prison when they were arrested on espionage charges and held for two weeks. On their release they were interviewed for the BBC by Woodrow Wyatt, who rebuked them for having been 'larking about', and Roger was subsequently sent down from Oxford. He secured a BA in English, French and classical Persian literature as an external student of London University. His gift for languages saw him assigned to the Russian interpreter's course during his National Service with the Army. After training as a journalist at the Toronto bureau of United Press, in 1958 he decided to pursue a long-held fascination with Persian culture and travelled to Iran. He lived there on and off for two decades while working variously as a journalist, teacher and interpreter. In 1960 he married an Iranian woman, Guity Habibian, and converted to Islam; they had a daughter, but were divorced in 1965. Some of Cooper's articles for The New Statesman on human rights abuses earned him unwelcome attention from Savak, the secret police, but the Shah admired his eloquence sufficiently to hire him as a speechwriter. Cooper secured the final press interview with the Shah before the Revolution forced his exile in 1979. Cooper decided that he too was better off out of Iran after the Revolution, but made frequent return visits in the 1980s in his new role as a consultant, using his knowledge of the Middle East to aid international firms keen to do business in the region. Following his arrest in 1985, he found his time in solitary confinement in his two-by-three-metre cell rather restful, and was annoyed when the British government successfully lobbied for him to be spared this psychological ordeal and housed with the other prisoners. He became proficient at Persian crosswords: 'the guards would always call, 'Cooper, what's 10 across?'' On more than one occasion a guard summarily told him that it was time for his death sentence to be enacted, released the safety catch on his revolver and pulled the trigger – with the gun being empty. But Cooper refused to be cowed by such sadistic pranks and enjoyed teasing the guards. His calculator was taken away and examined after one of the guards suggested that it might contain a secret radio transmitter; after it was returned, Cooper would periodically shout into it: 'Hello! Hello! Mrs Thatcher? Hello? I have a message. Jaffar is on duty in prison today.' After nearly five and a half years, Cooper's incarceration came to an abrupt end: on April 2 1991 he was driven to the airport and told his sentence had been suspended. David Reddaway, the British chargé d'affaires in Tehran, who had worked tirelessly to secure his release, met him there and lent him a tie to face the press; they then flew together to Heathrow. There was some suggestion that Cooper was freed in exchange for the release of Mehrdad Kowkabi, an Iranian student on remand after being accused of setting fire to a London bookshop selling Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Cooper himself thought he had benefited from the advent in Iran of the comparatively liberal President Rafsanjani: 'The Iran which has set me free is not the same as the Iran that arrested me. Today's Iran is far more humanitarian.' Living in Britain once more, Cooper resumed work as a journalist, writing a regular 'Rip Van Winkle' column for the Telegraph in which he mused on changes in British life that had occurred in his long absence. He was also in demand as a forthright reviewer of memoirs by other prisoners and hostages. Criticising Terry Waite's Taken on Trust as being 'almost totally deficient' in humour, he observed that Waite 'might have survived his ordeal better if he had found something to laugh at – if only at himself'. Cooper always denied that he had been involved in espionage in Iran, and claimed he had just been unlucky. 'I think, perhaps unfortunately, I matched the profile of an English spy… I had no particular job, and I'd lived there for many years.' Despite his insouciant attitude and lack of bitterness to the Iranians, Cooper deeply regretted that his mother and one of his brothers had died during his captivity without knowing that he would one day be released; he also suffered from PTSD. In his later years he ran a property and holiday business in Spain. Roger Cooper's second marriage, to Cherlee Botkin, an American, was also dissolved. He is survived by his daughter, Gisu, who came to live in Britain with her father and became a GP. Roger Cooper, born January 29 1935, died May 18 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
New York Post
2 hours ago
- New York Post
Tom Homan ‘convinced' US will see major terror attack because of Biden's lax border policies: ‘It's coming'
Border czar Tom Homan warned Monday that he's 'convinced' the US will suffer a major terrorist attack as a direct result of former President Joe Biden's immigration and border policies. 'It's coming,' Homan said of the possibility of a 9/11-style attack conducted by migrants who illegally snuck across the southern border under Biden. The roughly 2 million so-called 'gotaway' migrants that border patrol agents never apprehended during the previous administration concerns Homan more than the drug smuggling or sex trafficking that took place on the US-Mexico boundary during Biden's only term in office, he told Fox News host Sean Hannity. Advertisement 3 Homan argued that the Biden administration was granting work permits to 'unvetted' migrants. Fox News 'These 2 million known gotaways scares the hell out of me,' Homan said, adding that he fears some could be terrorists. 'I'm convinced something's coming unless we can find them,' he warned. Advertisement Homan, who President Trump has tasked to oversee efforts to carry out his mass deportation plan, noted that it was alarming to him that millions of migrants went to great, and expensive, lengths to avoid detection when the Biden administration was quickly releasing illegal border-crossers into the US. 'Why did 2 million illegal aliens pay more to get away?' Homan told Hannity. 'They could have paid half of what they paid to cross the border, turn themselves into border patrol agents, get released that same day, get a free airline ticket to the city of their choice, get a free hotel room, get three meals a day, plus free medical care and work authorization.' 'Two million people paid more to get away,' he argued. 'They didn't want to be vetted. They didn't want to be fingerprinted. Why?' 'This scares the hell out of me and I've been doing this for 40 years. It should have scared the hell out of every American what the Biden administration did.' Advertisement 3 An Egyptian national on an expired work visa allegedly carried out an antisemitic terror attack in Colorado on Sunday. Homan described the 'gotaways' as 'the biggest national security vulnerability this country's ever seen' and predicted the US will be grappling with the effects of Biden's border policies 'for the next ten years.' The border czar's comments come one day after a madman who was in the country illegally torched and wounded 12 people with a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails in an antisemitic terror attack in Boulder, Colorado. The suspected firebomber, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is a 45-year-old Egyptian national who entered the country on a tourist visa in 2022, sought asylum and later obtained a work permit from the Biden administration, according to the Trump administration. Advertisement 3 Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, has been charged in the Boulder terror attack. Boulder County Sheriff's Office/AFP via Getty Images Soliman's work visa expired this past March, meaning he was no longer in the country legally. Homan lamented that 'even through the legal process, the Biden administration was bringing people unvetted' and 'handing out work visas like they're candy.'
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘Skin Was Basically Melted': Witness Recalls Horror of Boulder Terror Attack
A man who helped victims of the Boulder terror attack before police arrived on the scene has spoken about the horror of seeing skin melting off their bodies. Law enforcement officials have now identified eight victims from Sunday's attack at Pearl Street Mall during a protest demanding the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Four women and four men aged between 52 and 88 were taken to Denver metro hospitals, at least one of whom was in a critical condition. Wanting to only be identified as Brian H due to safety concerns, the witness told MSNBC he was having lunch with his family when a woman ran past them shouting that a man was 'throwing fire at people.' He saw the suspect with a tank on his back, carrying a bottle. 'I saw fabric coming out of it, and I quickly realized that it was a Molotov cocktail,' Brian said. 'One had already exploded right in front of us.' Brian ran to the courthouse and saw the suspect yelling 'F--- you Zionists, you're killing all my people.' After filming the man on his phone in case the police needed identification, he called 911. 'I told her to hurry, there are people literally having the skin melt off their bodies,' Brian said. People were taking buckets of water out of a nearby fountain to pour on the victims 'to make them more comfortable' while others were bringing large buckets of iced water from a nearby restaurant to extinguish the flames. 'There was one man, probably in his fifties or sixties, he was in shock,' Brian said. 'His leg from his ankle to foot, all the way up to his buttocks was melted. His skin was basically melted off his leg.' Brian said there were 'deep cuts' up to an inch thick in several of the victims with blood 'pouring' out of them. He also detailed two elderly women who had been injured: '(One) her whole back leg from her calf up to her butt, the skin was falling off the leg. The other woman had burns all over her hands, ankles, feet, elbows. They looked stunned (and) confused.' Brian said the smell of gasoline at the crime scene was potent. 'I thought it initially was alcohol, but I assume it was gasoline, which again singed the pants off of some of these elderly women and the shirt off of one of the women that I can't really, frankly, I can't imagine... I hope she survives.' Police identified the suspect as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian who was arrested at the scene. Online booking records show Soliman was booked shortly before midnight on multiple felony charges, including one count of using explosives or incendiary devices to commit a felony, first-degree assault against an elderly or at-risk adult, and two counts of murder in the first degree. So far, authorities have not announced any deaths from the Pearl Street Mall attack. At least one of the victims was taken to the hospital in critical condition. The Daily Beast has reached out to the Boulder County Sheriff's Office for comment. The FBI is investigating the attack as a targeted act of terrorism. Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfearn said: 'Boulder is not immune to tragedy, sadly, and I know a lot of people are scared right now and questioning how this happened and why. Boulder has recovered from acts of violence before and we will again recover. I urge this community to come together. Now is not the time to be divisive.'
