Closure of all her accounts: Details of the arrest of the wife of Brotherhood member Hisham Abdullah in Turkey
After Turkish authorities arrested Ghada Najib, the wife of the Egyptian artist who fled to Turkey, Hisham Abdullah, they deported her to a prison in the Edirne area on the Bulgarian border, where she is being held pending further proceedings and consideration for deportation from the country. Turkish authorities also compelled the artist’s wife to close all her accounts on social media platforms.
The artist’s wife has been under house arrest since her detention in October last year for her criticism of the Egyptian regime. At the time, a Turkish court decided to place her under house arrest for a period of 6 months, during which she would be monitored, and after the end of that period, she would be deported from the country.
The artist’s wife filed a request seeking to overturn the judge’s decision to place her under surveillance, but the judge rejected the request and issued an order numbered 9521 for the year 2023, placing her under surveillance and ordering her deportation from Turkey under articles 54 and 57 of Law No. 6458, known as the Foreigners and International Protection Law, and informing the Migration Administration of the Malatya province.
On Thursday, after the end of the six-month period, Turkish authorities again arrested Ghada Najib, which the artist’s wife mentioned in a video on her social media page, saying she was surprised by police knocking on her apartment door and asking her to dress and accompany them to a security center for questioning.
She mentioned that she believed her arrest was due to some of her tweets criticizing Egypt and the Egyptian regime on social media.
There had been suspicions previously about the artist’s wife’s connections with foreign organizations outside Turkey, as well as suspicions about her mysterious relationship with a French journalist recently arrested by Paris for disseminating false information about Egypt and the Egyptian authorities, as well as continuing to incite against Cairo and the Egyptian president on social media despite warnings from Turkish authorities and their request to stop it.
It is worth noting that the wife of the Egyptian artist Hisham Abdullah’s full name is Ghada Mohamed Najib Sheikh Jameel Sabouni, born in Cairo on February 3, 1972. She is of Syrian origin and relinquished her Egyptian nationality to reside abroad, with a conviction in a terrorism case against state security.
In 2019, the 14th Chamber of the Cairo Criminal Court sentenced Hisham Abdullah and his wife to 5 years in prison in case No. 1102 of 2017, and in 2020, the Official Gazette published a decision by Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to revoke her Egyptian nationality.
