Last Tuesday Ada had flown in from France to Cairo to spend time with her husband in the country he was born in, and the country they "fell in love". Unfortunately for Ada, this was a trip she would remember for all the wrong reasons.
In a post shared over a thousand times on Facebook, Ada describes her ordeal at Cairo International Airport as "hours of interrogation, detention, and inhumane treatment".
After several hours of questioning, at around 6.00am, the interrogation officer and a few other accompanying guards came out of the room. They told me to take my bags while they told my husband, "Leave her here and go home and sleep because she's not going to enter Egypt again"
Ada was forced to take her luggage to "quarantine" where she was denied access to food, water and the bathroom, despite "bleeding heavily" from a recent surgery. Ada claims that the security officers knew of this but this "did not matter to them".
I sat in a room across another security officer, who had locked Syrian migrants in the detention room next to mine. In this time my husband and I desperately communicated through phone to find me the next flight out, which he had to pay on his own dime. I am sure I was allowed the phone privilege because I have an American passport. The Syrians on the other side were treated with extreme cruelty and humiliated in words I cannot repeat.
Ada's horror at Cairo International Airport does not stop there. When she was finally allowed access to a bathroom, officers mocked Ada as she was stuck inside the bathroom "bang[ing] to be let out".
I entered the bathroom again to find it was attached to another detention room - for women. I saw a room of beds where a Nigerian girl heard me and tried to comfort me, as I was bawling and near fainting at this point. This girl, who is pregnant, had already been locked up in this room for 15 days. And yet she was the one consoling me, the one with enough privilege and resources to leave.
Although Ada does not know the reason as to why she was barred entry to Egypt, she is not optimistic that she will be reunited with her husband soon there.
I have not found out, from any source of any kind, why I am not allowed in Egypt. I only recently read that the same day there were also foreign journalists detained and deported from Cairo. Today I filed a complaint - a handwritten شكوى - at the Egyptian consulate in Berlin to see if I can find another way in. It will make no difference. My own embassy said it is out of their hands. The police state will do its bidding. Violence in all forms is arbitrary.
Share This Article
