brief student stories

A student came to my office about an hour ago. He was in Tahrir during the protests and was never harmed, but his friend took a bullet in the lung on January 28. Fortunately, his friend has now been released from the hospital and is doing fine.

This particular student was very excited about the Nobel Peace Prize nomination for the Egyptian populace. He also had some interesting plans for showcasing Tahrir as an international tourist site, which I suspect it will become.

One of our student newspapers (there are now three competing papers, I believe) carried a story about one of our students who was picked up by the secret police. On January 28, he burned a Mubarak poster on the street. Plain clothes officers grabbed him and threw him into the back of a van.

I think he said there were around 50 people crammed into the back of the van. One died of suffocation, and his body was tossed out onto the street. In the cells of the secret police, he had an asthma attack and at first they refused to give him an inhaler. Some diabetic prisoners were given little or no insulin. And on top of that, the other usual sorts of things happened.