police trial postponed in beating death of blogger Khaled Said

Khaled Said’s brutal death in Alexandria in 2010 can be viewed as the spark that led to this year’s revolution.

The trial of the police officers in that case (there wasn’t going to be one at all, until protestors last year showed unprecedented rage) has been postponed from February 25 to March 26.

HERE.

For those who missed my earlier background posts on the unfortunate Mr. Said, here are two.

1. At the CHRONIKLER BLOG, you can see the grisly before/after photos of the young man, which expose as an utter lie the initial claim that he choked to death after swallowing marijuana to hide the evidence of drug use. This was preposterously claimed by two consecutive forensic reports, which insultingly added that Mr. Said did hit a blunt object, but that this was not the cause of death.

Also on that page you can find a link to the video that got him killed after he posted it on the web. It appears to show corrupt Alexandria police officers divvying up drugs seized in a bust. Reportedly he was dragged from an Alexandria cybercafe and beaten to death in front of eyewitnesses. The resulting protest was a new level of ferocious by the Egyptian populace. It did give me (and many others) the sense that something had snapped and the public would be taking less crap from the government in the future. The government also seemed mildly alarmed at the time by the severity of the reaction, and they did decide to throw the police officers to the hounds and let them be tried, whereas the first reaction was to claim they’d done nothing wrong.

2. The second post I want to link to again here is the MOVING FOOTAGE of a crowd celebrating outside Said’s apartment in Alexandria following Mubarak’s resignation. The now famous Wael Ghonim of Google acquired his moral stature by serving as the secret administrator of a Facebook group in honor of Said.

If you want to see the Facebook group, search for “We Are All Khaled Said,” which has 96,000 “likes.” Please click “like” yourself, as I just did. It’s a Facebook page that sparked a revolution.