The site 25 Leaks has published a 2008 State Security Police document, detailing some of the new departments established within the now dissolved apparatus. Tons of names are listed and I invite you to check them out and come forward with any more information you have about them. These officers who ran Mubarak’s gestapo should be held accountable and treated as the bosses of a criminal syndicate.
Among the names on that list is SS General Rushdi el-Qamari who’s been profiled previously in the Piggipedia. It turned out that the man, who served and still serves as the interior ministry’s representative on the NTRA board and who oversaw the telecommunications shut down during the January uprising, was the director of a department in SS called “The General Information Department,” serving as the head of the “Telecommunications and Coding Group”.
Activist Ramy Raoof has put together a timeline of the state’s telecommunication shutdown during the uprising. Click on the diagram above to enlarge.
The Administrative court fined Mubarak, former PM Nazif and former interior minister Habib el-Adly LE540 millions for cutting the internet during the revolution. However, the mobile phone operators, which I regard as complicit, are off the hook and will even receive compensations:
Telecoms operator Vodafone said in January it and other mobile operators had no option but to comply with an order from the authorities to suspend services in selected areas of the country during the peak of the anti-government demonstrations.
In February, Vodafone also accused the authorities of using its network to send pro-government text messages to subscribers.
Communications and Information Technology Minister Maged Othman said his ministry planned to pay compensation estimated at around 100 million pounds to mobile telecoms operators for losses caused by the service disruption, the state news agency MENA said. It said the figure was reached by independent bodies.
The operators have had a moral obligation to say no. And no matter what “national security” obligations they signed onto when receiving their license from the state, they could have sent out warnings to the millions of customers prior to cutting the service, which could have saved lives.
And if Mubarak, Nazif and Adly were found found guilty, what about Mubarak’s minister of telecommunication, Tarek Kamel? Not only is he off the hook, but he’s been rewarded a seat in the NTRA board of directors, where General Rushdi el-Qamari still keeps his position.
The money should not go to the companies. The money should be go to the families of the martyrs and injured whose lives could have been saved if the telecommunication network was up and running during the uprising.
The National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority NTRA has reshuffled its board, and guess what? Not only did SS General Rushdi el-Qamari keep his post, as the interior ministry’s representative on its board, but also Tarek Kamel, Mubarak’s infamous minister of telecommunications, has joined! You can find both their names on the official website of NTRA.
What kind of sick musical chairs game is going on here? How can the orchestrators of Mubarak’s crackdown on telecommunications during the uprising be rewarded posts in the new revolutionary Egypt?
Hundreds of State Security Police officers, with their job occupations, phone numbers, have been exposed by 25Leaks website…
I’ve just skimmed through it quickly now. I’ll for sure do more investigations later, but if there is one thing that has been a trend in SS: It’s a family business. I’m seeing names of junior SS officers whose daddies are also in SS.
One quick example (check page 2), you’ll find that our General Rushdi el-Qamari had a son who worked at the SS Heliopolis Bureau: Captain Mohamed Rushdi el-Qamari.
Previously I posted a link to another site with more names and phone numbers here…
More from the Piggipedia soon…
During the uprising, the regime took down the internet from the night of 27 January till 3 February, after blocking websites like Twitter and Facebook on the previous day. The government also took down the mobile phone networks and SMS, with the complicity of the three operators Mobinil, Vodafone Egypt and Etisalat, as well as internet service providers like TE DATA.
The government body that orchestrated the blackout was the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA), headed by the former Telecommunication Minister Tarek Kamel (whose brother Cairo University President Hossam Kamel is currently the target of an impeachment campaign by faculty staff and student protesters over his ties to the Mubarak regime), together with representatives from the police, Mukhabarrat and government officials.
The Interior Ministry’s representative on the board of NTRA during the revolution was General Rushdi el-Qamari, whose profile pictures I found on the Nasr City SS DVDs.
Little I managed to find out about the career of General Rushdi Mohamed Sayyed Ahmad el-Qamari, before he became the head of the General Administration of Police Communications in July 2010. But usually heads of such sensitive departments in the interior ministry come from the ranks of State Security Police, especially as he assumed the membership of the NTRA board, sharing seats with the Mukhabarrat.
Essam Sharaf’s cabinet has come out few days ago saying the regime’s shutting down of telecommunications was “inappropriate.” But has anyone been held accountable? What happened to NTRA board members, including General Qamari? Have they been investigated? Do they still keep their posts? Or are we continuing with the musical chairs game?
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