00:00Beneath the midday sun outside 10 Downing Street, 69-year-old Leila Swaif leans against the railing,
00:06her resolve unwavering. For 233 days, Miss Swaif has been on hunger strike,
00:13protesting the continued imprisonment of her son, Alaa Abdel Fattah, in Egypt. On Tuesday,
00:18she addressed a direct plea to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government,
00:23urging them to secure her son's release.
00:25For Alaa, sitting in prison, now on hunger strike, for 81 days since the first of March,
00:35nothing has changed. Nothing has happened. I am Alaa's mother. We are Alaa's family.
00:42What actually happens to Alaa is what we care about. We have used up more days than we ever thought we
00:50had. We need Alaa reunited with his son Khalid now. There are no more days.
00:57Alaa Abdel Fattah, a prominent Egyptian activist, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2019
01:04on charges of spreading false news by sharing a Facebook post about torture in Egypt. Human
01:10rights organizations have condemned the charges as baseless and the trial is a sham. Though his
01:15sentence was due to end in late September 2024, Abdel Fattah remains behind bars in Cairo's notorious
01:22Torah prison, where conditions have been described as horrific by Human Rights Watch. In solidarity with
01:28her son, Swaif has refused all food since his continued detention began. Since the beginning of
01:34her hunger strike in September, she has lost 36 kilograms, about 42 percent of her original body
01:40weight. In February, the Prime Minister spoke to the Egyptian President, Sisi, about the case, prompting
01:47Miss Swaif to relent on her hung strike and begin consuming a 300 calorie liquid supplement. However,
01:55she has been disappointed by the lack of recent progress and so, with consent from her family,
02:02has since decided to stop taking the liquid supplement. How much hope do you hold that your actions
02:08are going to have positive reactions from from Kistama and Egypt as well?
02:13I'll be honest. I'm almost 90 percent sure that in the end of this, Alaa will be Kist. I'm not
02:22at all sure that it'll be in time to save my health or my health. Because, you know, as Alaa put said,
02:34governments are like dinosaurs. They move very slowly.
02:41Each day, Leila Swaif returns to Downing Street, pressing the Prime Minister and his cabinet to
02:48secure her son's release. It's a mother's protest that soon could fade.
03:04So, I look at the political and a couple of times, it's a woman that is trying to keep like
03:07two or three days away. It's a woman that never ended up being a child. Now, this is a mom that
03:08is a woman, the investors the third person who is able to keep, you know, this is an
03:10woman and she is very much more of a woman who matches the next time. The reason she makes
03:11a child who wanted to stay to this woman, she lands in
03:16this woman and she is the woman to have an ability to keep, the man to come, and she sees the woman.
03:18So, she can have a child who has to be a child who has to be a child.
03:20So, she can be a child who gets a child who has seen the child so she has to be a child, and I will ask her and she was born in her
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