The group of families was on a bus, heading towards Alexandria, according to a video submitted to Rudaw by one of the group. The driver dropped them off, saying they had arrived at their destination, but they were picked up by the police.
“Police then arrested us, and we have been at Burullus police station for four days,” an unidentified Kurdish man said in the video.
“Both the judge and the police station have said that you are free to leave, yet we are being kept here without any food. We have children with us, we are dying,” he added.
The group, which includes people from Erbil, Sulaimani, and Halabja, left for Egypt on April 16.
“They wanted to cross to Italy, but they were arrested on land before reaching any water,” Alan Abdullah, whose son is among the group in Egypt, told Rudaw’s Hawraz Gulpi on Sunday.
“Their visa expires on May 17,” he added. “They are in a very bad state. They do not even give them food. There are children who are one or two years old.”
Abdullah said he last spoke with his son four days ago, when he said they were going to Alexandria. When they were arrested, their phones and identity cards were seized. But one in the group was able to hide his phone from the police and that is now the only connection Abdullah has with his son.
An organization in Sulaimani is working to bring the group home. "Lutka has started its attempts to collect the paperwork of those people and safely bring them back to the Kurdistan Region," Botan Sharbazhery, of the Sulaimani-based Summit Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs (Lutka), told Rudaw English on Sunday.
In November, 27 Kurdish migrants were arrested en route to Italy by the Egyptian navy after their vessel broke down mid-journey.
Egypt is an important transit country for migrants from the Middle East and Africa hoping to reach Europe. In 2016, Egypt passed an anti-human smuggling law and “migrants and asylum seekers in Egypt are particularly vulnerable to detention and deportation,” according to a 2019 report by EuroMed Rights.
