Egypt refuses to free jailed activist Alaa Abdel Fattah: sister

Egyptian authorities have refused to release dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah despite serving out his five-year sentence, his sister said Sunday.

Abdel Fattah, 42, was arrested on September 29, 2019. Just over two years later, he was handed a five-year sentence for "spreading false news" by sharing a Facebook post about police brutality.

His family on Thursday urged the government of Britain, where Abdel Fattah holds citizenship, to ensure his release this weekend.

But on Sunday his sister Mona Seif said in a video posted to social media that the authorities "refused a request" to consider the two years of pre-trial detention as time served towards his sentence.

She said the authorities are instead counting his sentence as having started from the date that it was ratified, and has thereby set the date of his release for January 2027.

Seif had told reporters in London on Thursday that "if he is not out by September 29, it is an open-ended sentence".

A writer and computer programmer, Abdel Fattah has spent the better part of more than a decade behind bars, having been jailed repeatedly under successive presidents since Egypt's 2011 uprising.

He was granted UK citizenship through his British-born mother in 2022 while he was in prison.

Rights groups say there are tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt, held under poor conditions and subject to ill treatment and abuses by the authorities.