On May 24th, three undergraduate students at the German University in Cairo were put under arrest by the police authorities after the university’s administration accused them of attacking the chancellor of the university and its security men.

Alaa El Attar, Karim Naguib, Vice President of the Student Union, and Hazem Abdel-Khalek have received, on May 25th, orders of staying under arrest for four days in New Cairo’s police station whilst investigations are run post their questioning. The news has been confirmed on GUC’s Student Union’s Facebook page, as well as by the Student Union representative, whom we directly talked to.

GUC’s administration had, after meeting up with the arrested students’ parents, promised to withdraw the accusations against the students, according to an insider, if the students agreed to hand in a written apology. Upon refusal from the students to apologize for their actions, the administration did not lift the accusations and they were put under further arrest to allow for additional investigations by the authorities.

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(A picture of Alaa El Attar with police clutches on her hands that has been circulating on social media)

The three students had actively joined the collective strike against the administration’s way of handling the death of Yara Tarek last March, after she was hit and crushed to death by a bus in the university’s parking lot. The striking students were participating in this open strike to demand for more investigation in the incident, as well as proper reprimanding of the administration. Seven other students are said to also be accused of the same offences and have been called for questioning by the authorities as well. According to one of the students who has been called for questioning, and asked to be quoted anonymously, they had received phone calls asking for them to hand themselves in for questioning right on the brink of finals week.

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(Hazem Abdel-Khalek and Karim Naguib, two of the students currently under police custody)

GUC’s administration, according to Alaa El Attar, had promised that if the students halted the strike back in March to allow for better negotiations, none of them would get harmed in any way. Many students, who had not attended the midterm exams whilst striking, had their petitions, however, to attend make-up exams denied, and had consequently failed, and literally gotten zero grades on, the tests.

Said students, according to the SU representative we talked to, in a harmless act of satire brought a cake with “Zeros (referring to their grades) Are for Champions” written on it to the university, sliced it up and sent it to the deans of the university. “This action seems to have been what caused the administration to not back down on the accusations and calls for the arrest of the striking students that they had requested from the police,” said the SU’s representative.

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(Empty exam halls during midterms week as the striking students boycotted the exams)

GUC’s Student Union released a video online post the arrest showing Dr. Mahmoud Hesham, the university’s president, talking to the striking students and stating: “all your demands will be met”.

“The only ‘change’ that has occurred in the bus parking lot and parking system is that the parking lot has expanded in size after a part of the private cars’ parking lot has been taken and added to its parameter. Also, some cones have been placed behind the unmoving buses. Other than that, no rear-view mirrors were added to the parking lot, and nowadays security men are hardly ever even seen there,” said M.Z., a Pharmacy undergraduate at GUC.

“Some Architecture students had put together a new design for the parking lot in order to make it safer for bus riders, which featured a sidewalk to be built for people to walk on in order to avoid coming in contact with the buses. So far, there has been no sign of it being implemented,” M.Z. continued.

Revealing yet another way in which GUC’s administration has continued to punish the striking students, M.Z. stated: “apart from all the legal complications and accusations that some of the striking students have received, others who had joined the strike and later on applied for semesters abroad in Berlin, got their requests turned down due to their ‘disciplinary problems and misconduct,’ as the administration has put it.”

In the same video that had showed the chancellor’s unmet promises, Alaa speaks out about her accusations: “Am I the one whose carelessness caused a student to die on campus? No. Did I do anything wrong for which I deserve punishment? As far as I remember, I did not. Am I wasting away the future of students? No. Am I an administration who’s actively kicking out graduating students from university? No. Then why are we being called for questioning by the authorities?”