Refugee kidnappings in Sinai

Since 2011, reports of a series of organized kidnappings for ransom have emerged from Sinai. Refugees from various countries, are transported to Sinai and held hostage by members of Bedouin tribes. Typically, the hostages are forced to give up phone numbers of relatives and are tortured with the relatives on the phone, in order to obtain ransoms in the range of $20,000 - $40,000. If the families can't pay, the hostages are killed.[1][2][3]

Many of the hostages, refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia or Eritrea, paid traffickers for transport to the Israeli border, hoping to cross into that country. They were instead taken hostage by those they had paid.[2] Others were taken by force from refugee camps in Sudan, as reported by the United Nations Refugee Agency in January 2013.[4] Amnesty International published a report about numerous kidnappings in 2011-2013 in the Shagarab refugee camps in eastern Sudan, carried out by members of the Rashaida tribe, with victims being sold off to gangs in Sinai, where they would be brutally mistreated to extract ransoms.[5] In 2012 Israel constructed a fence at its border to Sinai to keep out African migrants, causing the Rashaida to lose income from transporting refugees to the border; they then started to concentrate on kidnappings instead.[6]

German journalist Michael Obert visited the region in 2013,[7] met a victim and a torturer and talked to an activist of the New Generation Foundation for Human Rights in Al-Arish. The organization has documented hundreds of cases of mutilated corpses of Africans found in the desert. Obert reported that some Islamist militants were using force to try to stop the kidnapper gangs. He described a lawless and impoverished region where children were looking forward to grow up to become kidnappers.[1]

The Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty of 1979 limits the number of Egyptian forces that can be deployed in Sinai.[6] After the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, security forces have largely abandoned the peninsula.[8]

A 2011 CNN documentary reported on Eritrean refugees who had paid Bedouin traffickers for transport to Israel but were instead held in bondage before their organs were harvested.[9] In 2013 the Al-Arish activist presented photos of corpses from which organs had been professionally removed and claimed to have seen mobile operation units.[1]

In February 2011, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel reported that some 190 Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees were being held hostage in Sinai, and that numerous refugee women reported having been raped on their trip to Israel.[10] In 2013, the same organization estimated that about 1,000 refugees were being held in Sinai hostage camps, and that in total about 7,000 refugees had been abused in these camps, resulting in more than 4,000 deaths.[1]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Michael Obert (2013). "Im Reich des Todes". SZ Magazin (in German) 29.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Phoebe Greenwood (14 February 2012). "Egyptian authorities look the other way as Bedouin kidnap refugees". The Guardian.
  3. ↑ Mike Thomson (6 March 2013). "Sinai torture for Eritreans kidnapped by traffickers". BBC News.
  4. ↑ "Refugees disappearing from eastern Sudan may be trafficking victims – UN agency". UN News Centre. 25 January 2013.
  5. ↑ "Egypt/Sudan Refugees and Asylumseekers Face Brutal Treatment, Kidnapping for Rannsom, and Human Trafficking". Amnesty International. April 2013.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Egypt: ‘In Sinai, I saw hell’; refugees are easy prey for brutal human traffickers". Washington Times. 21 July 2013.
  7. ↑ http://www.obert.de/text/sinai
  8. ↑ "Lawless Sinai Shows Risks Rising in Fractured Egypt". The New York Times. 10 August 2013.
  9. ↑ "Death in the Desert". CNN. 8 November 2011.
  10. ↑ Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (23 February 2011). "Hostages, Torture, and Rape in the Desert: Findings from 284 Asylum Seekers about Atrocities in the Sinai".

Further reading