Two Christian converts from Islam who were locked in an Egyptian prison and held for three years without trial have been released, religious rights advocates said.
Abdulbaqi Saeed Abdo and Nour Girgis were released on Jan. 25. Both had been held in “pre-trial detention” since 2021 on blasphemy charges.
Abdo, who is from Yemen and had U.N. refugee status because of persecution he suffered there, has fled to Canada where he has been reunited with his family. Human rights activists have not publicly released the location of Girgis, who still has charges against him.
Agents from Egypt’s National Security Agency (NSA) raided Abdo’s home in December 2021, seized three laptops and arrested him. The raid on Abdo’s home happened after he appeared on a Christian television channel to discuss persecution of Christians in Yemen.
Egyptian authorities later identified Abdo as a member of a private Facebook group for converts from Islam and charged him with “joining a terrorist group with knowledge of its purposes” and “contempt of the Islamic religion.” Police also identified Girgis as a member of the alleged group and arrested him under the same charges.
Human rights advocates inside Egypt and abroad said the charges against the two Christians were dubious at best. Sean Nelson, legal counsel for Global Religious Freedom for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, who was part of a team to free them, said it was “astonishing” Abdo was charged for being on Facebook.
“They had no reason to detain him in the first place,” Nelson told Morning Star News. “He committed no crime in the first place. We are very happy he has been released. He has been there for over three years for his part in a Christian Facebook group.”
The illegality of the charges was compounded by the length of time the men were held, presumably awaiting trial, rights advocates said. Under Egyptian criminal law, the longest someone can be held without trial for a serious felony is two years. Abdo and Girgis should have been released or had their trials start by December 2023, but officials in the Interior Ministry who routinely violate Egyptian law refused to release them, according to right advocates.
In response to his legal limbo, and perhaps in desperation, Abdo had penned a letter to his five children and wife saying he would start refusing medical attention and go on a hunger strike to protest his detention.
“They arrested me without any legal justification. They did not convict me for any violation of the law,” Abdo wrote in the letter that was later made public. “And they did not set me free during my remand imprisonment which ended eight months ago.”
Conditions of confinement for the two men were very poor, according to Nelson. Abdo was held in solitary confinement, suffered a lack of medical treatment and was forced to live on what amounted to a sustenance diet. The hunger strike “was sort of a final cry for help that [conditions were] becoming intolerable,” Nelson said.
He added that he wasn’t sure why Egyptian officials under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi decided to release them, but that the hunger strike brought much attention to the case.
“I think it really galvanized international support for him,” Nelson told Morning Star News. “And I think around the world people thought no one should have to go through this for their faith.”
The Egyptian government has a history of persecuting converts who have left Islam. According to evangelical leaders in Egypt, the government routinely monitors church bodies looking for Muslims who may be in the process of religious conversion. The Egyptian NSA harasses converts who come to their attention, especially those who have gained any kind of public recognition.
“They view them as national security concerns,” Nelson said, adding that the Egyptian government thinks the activities of vocal converts will create public disturbances and lack of harmony in the country, so officials clamp down on any public religious dissent. “But what it actually does is create a less secure state. I hope that the Egyptian government recognizes that Christians aren’t dangerous or national security concerns. They are just living out their faith. The people that persecute others for their faith are the true security concerns.”
Article 98(f) of Egypt’s penal code outlaws insulting a “heavenly religion,” namely Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Violators face up to five years in prison under the law, which calls for a minimum of six months of prison.
The law, which functions essentially as Egypt’s “blasphemy” legislation against insulting religion, has come under fire for violating the country’s constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression and religious freedom. Used almost exclusively against criticisms of Islam, the law is rarely invoked against frequent, public anti-Christian comments.
Rights advocates have said the law needs to distinguish between honest critique of religion and speech explicitly meant to incite violence, but that in any event judges and police are biased in favor of Muslims and against Coptic Christians.
Since the Egyptian constitution was passed in 2014 by referendum, there have been numerous, high-profile blasphemy cases filed against Coptic Christians and converts on charges that were either fabricated or false, human rights activists said.
Abdo is no stranger to persecution. In 2014 his first wife was killed after a bottle thought to contain cooking oil exploded while she was cooking. Abdo was able to have his wife transported to a hospital, but the wounds were severe, and she died nearly two weeks later.
No one has ever been arrested in connection with her death, but after the fire, a relative told Abdo that his own brother and one of his wife’s brothers had drained the cooking oil from the bottle and replaced it with gasoline. When the gasoline hit the pan she was using to cook breakfast, it turned the bottle into a firebomb.
At the time of Abdo’s arrest in Egypt, he had U.N. refugee status because of the persecution he suffered in Yemen.
Egypt ranked 40th on Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.
