Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt

Bitter Outcome

At 2 p.m. that day, cars clogged Cairo's busiest streets. There were no signs of a popular strike. Maher, cruising the capital in a car, took a call from his wife, who was increasingly distraught over the dangers of his activism.

She had taken the baby and gone to her parents, she told him. Maher, in a black T-shirt and sunglasses shoved up on his shaved head, stared at his phone after the call. "All this for nothing," he said.

In front of Cairo's main scene of recent protests, security forces stood guard. A few young men in black T-shirts handed out pamphlets. Some women chanted in an area ringed by police and State Security agents. When two young men walked up to join the women, police pushed them away.

Elsewhere in the city, some heeded the call to strike.

Poor people, even more than the middle class, knew what the strike was about, Hibba Imam, 22, said in the decayed and crowded quarter of Imbaba. "The connected people, they don't feel the suffering. They don't see the bread lines," she said, adding that she had stayed indoors until Sunday afternoon. Imam had heard of Facebook, she said. Many others in the neighborhood said they never had.

By late afternoon, of the 74,000 people who had registered on the Facebook protest page, only 15 -- three men and 12 women -- were still eager to gather for a protest. Maher was not one of them.

"What should I do?" Mustafa asked Maher by cellphone after police forced her back from the main protest area. "Go home," Maher told her.

"By the end of the day, I was sobbing," Mustafa said later. Bitter, she deleted herself from the Facebook group. After a few hours, she signed back up.

The next day, Monday, May 5, the government stunned Egyptians by increasing fuel prices more than 40 percent.

That Wednesday, police arrested Maher as he tried to return to his empty home for the first time in days. Police and then State Security forces beat him from 1 p.m. Wednesday until 3 a.m. Thursday, stripping him naked, slapping him, dragging him across the floor tied to a rope and threatening to rape him, Maher said. They demanded passwords to the Facebook groups, although the groups do not require passwords, and the real names of those who had registered, he said.

Maher was released with bruises and one ear deafened by blows. "This time we were just tugging on your ear," Maher quoted a State Security official telling him. "Next time it will be serious."

Special correspondent Nora Younis contributed to this report.