LONDON (AP) — The mother of a pro-democracy activist imprisoned in Egypt is seriously ill in a London hospital after resuming a hunger strike aimed at pressing for her son’s release, her family said Friday.
Laila Soueif was admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital on Thursday night with dangerously low blood sugar levels.
“A couple of hours ago I thought we were going to lose her,” her daughter, Sanaa Souief, said outside the hospital. “The bottom line is, we’re losing her.”
She added: “(Prime Minister) Keir Starmer needs to act now. Not tomorrow, not Monday, but right now.”
Laila Soueif has been on hunger strike since Sep. 29 to protest the imprisonment of Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a British-Egyptian dual national who has been in prison in Egypt since September 2019.
He was sentenced in December 2021 to five years in prison for spreading false news and should have been released last year, but Egyptian authorities refused to count the more than two years he had spent in pre-trial detention and ordered him held until January 2027.
Laila Souief spent weeks camped outside Britain’s Foreign Office and the prime minister’s Downing Street office to highlight her son’s case.
She was previously admitted to hospital in February, with doctors warning she was at “high risk of sudden death.” She agreed in early March to move to a partial hunger strike after Starmer pledged to press Egypt to release her son.
She resumed her full hunger strike on May 20, saying: “Nothing has changed, nothing is happening.”
The family says Souief has lost 42% of her bodyweight during the 242-day hunger strike. They say she has received glucagon treatment, which induces the liver to break down stored fat to obtain glucose, but continues to refuse glucose, which would provide her with calories.
Abdel-Fattah has been on his own hunger strike for 90 days following his mother’s admission to hospital in February.
Thousands of critics of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi have been locked up under dire conditions after unjust trials, human rights groups say.
The British government said that Starmer raised Abdel-Fattah’s case in a call with the Egyptian president last week, and Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer discussed it with Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty on Sunday.
“We are concerned to hear of Laila’s hospitalization. We remain in regular contact with Laila and her family and have checked on her welfare,” the Foreign Office said in a statement. “We are committed to securing Alaa Abdel-Fattah’s release and continue to press for this at the highest levels of the Egyptian government.”
