‘I deserve to heal’: freed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah on his prison ordeal and next steps

The campaigner, who spent more than a decade in an Egyptian ‘vortex of incarceration’, wants to join his son in the UK while he reflects on the fight for freedom

The British-Egyptian human rights activist and writer, released from more than a decade in continuous detention in Cairo, has said he wants to come to the UK to be with his autistic 14-year-old son.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah said he feared his mother might have died on hunger strike during the 12 years he spent in what he described as a “vortex of incarceration”.

In an interview from Cairo, Abd el-Fattah also said he needed a pause in his human rights campaigning to give himself time to heal, adding he no longer believed prison was a necessary rite of passage on the route to freedom.

Smiling and joking in a Steve Biko T-shirt, he said he felt surprisingly well but needed time to find himself after so long either in solitary confinement or isolated in jail.