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Egyptian Blogger taken in Detention

Categories: Middle East & North Africa, Egypt, Breaking News, Freedom of Speech, Blogger Profiles

Manal and Alaa's blog writes [1]:

Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman is a 21 year-old Egyptian student of law at the Azhar University, Damanhour Campus, a women's-rights activist and a correspondent for Copts United [2].

أطلقوا سراح المدون المصري عبد الكريم
In addition to writing at Civic Dialogue [3], he also publishes at a blog he maintains [4].

On Wednesday 26 October 2005, Egyptian State Security took Abdolkarim from his home, and confiscated hard copies of his writings. He is now on his way to an unknown detention. Three Egyptian bloggers visited Abdolkarim's family. The family attributed the state security raid to his writings, although it was not clear if his blogging is directly related. According to his brother, Abdolkarim's relations with Islamist Fundamentalists in his neighborhood of Moharram Bek, Alexandria, are tense. It is possible that the fundamentalists have filed a security complaint that led to his detention.

More: Committee to Protect Bloggers [5], Egyptian Blogs [6], and http://technorati.com/tag/abdolkarim [7]

Update: According to Alaa, both digressing [8] and MalcomeX [9](Arabic) visited Abdel Karims family to help but Baheyya [10] reports (and Alaa confirms) that he may be in for a tough ride as he was very outspoken against Islam [11] (Arabic).

Update: Abdolkarim emailed another blogger (http://endehash.manalaa.net [12]) telling him how he doesn't fear getting his name published in a survey, as he beleives that the sensitive posts about religion he writes about should not be behind red lines. He also said that he fears the consequences and that he was once attacked by some thugs hired who attemted to beat him.
http://endehash.manalaa.net/kareem [13] [via: Mostafa [14]]