This report covers a pattern of suspicious killings and probable extrajudicial executions by Egyptian Interior Ministry forces of people who at the moment of their deaths apparently posed no life-threatening danger to security forces or others, and so amounted to deliberate and unlawful killings. In all of the cases documented here, the individuals appear to have been in custody prior to being killed and some were forcibly disappeared by National Security Agency forces. 

Following the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsy in July 2013, and particularly after the August 2013 violent dispersal of the pro-Morsy Rab’a sit-in when security forces killed at least 817 protesters in one day, Egypt witnessed a sharp rise in violent attacks by an array of armed Islamist groups, against security forces, government facilities, and civilians. Government and Interior Ministry statements almost always blamed these attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood, one of Egypt’s oldest and largest Islamist organization to which Morsy belonged and which was outlawed in 2013 following the military takeover.

Report by the Human Rights Watch