Hamed Abdel-Samad is disappeared.
Police in Cairo are investigating the disappearance of an Egyptian-born German author and critic of Islam, security sources said on Tuesday, months after a cleric declared him an infidel and called for his death.
Hamed Abdel-Samad, author of “The Downfall of the Islamic World: A Prognosis”, went missing in recent days, according to a missing person’s report filed by his brother, police sources said. An Egyptian newspaper report said he had been abducted.
The German ambassador in Cairo has asked Egypt’s deputy prime minister, Ziad Bahaa El-Din, to do everything to secure his “personal freedom and physical well-being”, a German Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.
He added Abdel-Samad, 41, had been in contact with the German embassy in Cairo regarding his personal safety, without giving further details. His whereabouts were unknown and the German authorities were working hard to solve the case, he said.
In a television show broadcast in June and posted on YouTube, an Egyptian cleric, Mahmoud Shaaban, called for the killing of the author, who frequently appears in German media as a speaker on Islamic affairs, saying he was an infidel.
If you criticize Islam, you will be harassed, imprisoned, abused, killed or thrown out of your country. No other people face the brutality and hatred of Muslims more than critics of Islam with Muslim background. Should ex-Muslims continue to be killed? When would faith-heads stop the silent genocide of anti-theists, atheists, rationalists, humanists?
We are not living in the 7th century, or are we actually living in the 7th century?