Blogger Mohamed el-Sharqawi has been released around noon today... I couldn't get thru to him or his fiance Naira, but I spoke with Amr and Malek few mins ago, and they both confirmed it. According to them, Sharqawi was not abused in custody this time, but his health is in a poor state since he had been on a hungerstrike since Thursday... He spent the night in Qasr el-Nil Police Station and was then taken to the Qasr el-Nil Prosecutor's Office, where he was interrogated on charges related to Magdi el-Shafie's "Metro"... Sharqawi was allowed to go home sometime around noon, but the interrogation is not over yet, and it seems the (Mubarak's book-burning) govt wanna push for a trial in court...

More worryingly is the news about the Mahalla detainees... The confirmed names of those who "disappeared" in State Security custody in Mahalla, according to Socialist sources in Cairo, are: Ghazl el-Mahalla labor activists Kamal el-Fayoumi, blogger Kareem el-Beheiri, Tarek Amin el-Senoussi and Abdel Halim Ahmad as well as others from outside the company: Mostafa Elzoghby Ibrahim, Ibrahim Abdallah, Mahmoud Ahmad.. There are unconfirmed reports these detainees, whose release had been ordered earlier by the Prosecutor, are now transferred to Bourg el-Arab Prison (Alexandria). But no one could confirm this from the Socialist and legal sources in Cairo I phoned. If this is true, then this means the Interior Ministry has issued them detention decrees.

I received this message from a Turkish activist who saw Kareem el-Beheiri ten mins before his arrest on the 7th of April...

I am Cigdem Cidamlı from Turkey and I was in Mahallah on 6th April as a representative of Turkish workers movement and Hayat TV together with ... and Kareem. Actually Kareem was arrested just 10 minutes after we left the hotel we stayed together at late evening. We had to return back to Turkey on 7th and after our program about Mahallah on Hayat TV various solidarity actions and statements are issued by Turkish labour circles. Below is the statement of Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (80 thousand membership) about Mahallah workers.
In solidarity,
Cigdem Cidamli
Stop The Repression of the Egyptian Workers Movement
In response to a call for a strike on April 6th by the workers in the Mahallah textile complex, the biggest factory in Egypt, the Mubarek regime decided to occupy El Mahalla complex with security forces, abduct strike committee leaders Kamal El Faioumy and Tarek Amin and arrest political
activists of every political tendency in Cairo and other cities. Not able to supress the protests, the Mubarek security forces used rubber bullets, tear gas and live ammunition against the Mahallah people who decided to protest on the streets of the city and in different villages, leaving at least two dead and hundreds injured and around 800 arrested.
We send our solidarity to the Egyptian workers and their supporters. We call on the Egyptian dictatorship to release the 800 detained yesterday including more than 150 political activists (socialist, liberales and Islamists), more than 600 protesters from Mahallah (mainly women and children) and Mahallah strike committee leaders.
Tayfun GORGUN
GENERAL SECRETARY OF DISK

I received also photos of the solidarity protest that took place in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Paris... Click below...

For continuous updates on the detainees in Arabic, follow Tadamon and the HMLC blogs...