Zubeida’s mother sued over spreading lies

CAIRO – 28 February 2018: Lawyer Tarek Mahmoud submitted an official complaint to the public prosecutor against Egyptian citizen Um Zubeida, who appeared in the recently published BBC report “The Shadow over Egypt”. He accused her of spreading lies and asking for other countries and governments' help against Egypt.

In the formal complaint issued February 25, it was stated that Um Zubeida (mother of Zubeida Ibrahim) asked American President Donald Trump to intervene against Egypt’s Interior Ministry, claiming that her daughter was forcibly abducted.

Um Zubeida added during the BBC interview that her daughter was sexually abused and raped by the ministry’s forces.

On February 23, BBC published a report titled "The Shadow over Egypt", in which a woman named Um Zubeida claimed that her daughter was forcibly abducted on April 8, 2017. Another interview conducted later by Egyptian TV host Amr Adeeb with her daughter, Zubeida Ibrahim, revealed that the information in the report was not accurate.

Zubeida revealed that she has been married for a year, has a son named Hamza and lives in the Faisal neighborhood. Ibrahim told Adeeb that she has not been talking to her mother for a year; the young woman chose not to reveal the reason behind her disagreement with her mother.

Ibrahim also added that she was jailed once for four months with her mother for joining a pro-Muslim Brotherhood protest. However, she denied being tortured when she was jailed in El Qanater prison.

The young woman said that her mother's false statements to BBC were given because the mother did not know her daughter’s whereabouts. Ibrahim asked her mother to forgive her and to accept to meet her as soon as possible. Ibrahim revealed that she did not know anything about the BBC’s controversial report, as she does not follow the news.

Ibrahim’s husband stated that he married her on March 13, 2017, without her family’s consent. He showed the marriage document, which dates back to March 2017, unlike the BBC allegations. BBC claimed that Ibrahim disappeared on April 8, 2017.

Ibrahim said that she had joined the Muslim Brotherhood’s Al Nahda sit-in back in 2013 for 10 days, along with her mother. During the interview, both women admitted their previous connection with the Muslim Brotherhood – a connection they later chose to abandon.