Esra’a of FreeKareem shared a letter with us from Kareem.

I got 2300 messages from everywhere , i feel so happy everytime i am receiving a letter , i feel that people
didnt forget about me

Our Flood the Jail with Mail campaign was much more of a success than I anticipated, I confess.

Check out this post to find out how to write Kareem.

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Update: Full text of Kareem’s letter in English below. Arabic version also at FreeKareen.

I am living through some decent days here which I know will not last. I have several activists with me who were detained during the strike on the 6th of April in Egypt. They are people like me. They are educated, and staunch believers in certain values which they are fighting for.

Some of these people are out now, and the others are waiting to be released. Sometimes I wonder if the reason why they’re here in the first place is to make me more sad when they leave me alone in the dark.

This is the first time since I’ve been in prison that I meet people who are intellectually similar to me, but they will soon be released and I will be lonely again.

I wish I can get out of here. Every time I witness people being released from prison to go back to their homes, I wonder when it’s time for me to also leave. I never did anything worthy of this punishment. I’ve been here for so long, and throughout my detainment, I was never convinced that I ever committed a crime. Their punishment is not effective. This prison never changed my mind, and it never will.

I got 2,300 messages from all over the world. I feel ecstatic every time I receive a letter. I feel that people didn’t forget about me. Sometimes, the prisoners here mock me and try to hurt me by telling me that people forgot about my existence, but when I look at all of these letters that I have in my cell… I don’t care about what the prisoners are saying, because I have concrete evidence with me proving them wrong.

I just wish I could get out of here.

Kareem Amer
Borg el Arab prison, Section 22 Cell 1
Alexandria, Egypt

A 24-year old blogger of Chinese extraction was arrested in Singapore for an allegedly racist post. The blogger goes by the name “Fragrant Prince.” (Ick.) A visit to the blog URL results in a message, “This blog is open to invited readers only.” Other bloggers said “Fragrant Prince,” whose name is Franco, replaced the allegedly offensive post with an apology. Google cached his blog. It looks like he said a guy was a “stupid Malay” and that he stank. Well, it’s official, the guy’s a tool. And now he’s in jail for it.

There have been Chinese-Malay riots in the past in Singapore and that seems to be the rationale for arresting this guy for a “thought crime.” But once you start arresting people for being tools, you better have a gigantic prison. In reality, of course, this is a tool for the maintenance of “order,” at all costs.

Human Rights Watch (via Sokari on our CPB Facebook Causes page) gives an account of another beating by Egyptian police. (I wish I had more time, or help, to do more original reporting on these issues, but, well, I don’t, so with apologies to HRW, I’m posting an edited version of their report.)

Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 27-year-old civil engineer, used the social-networking site Facebook to support calls for a general strike on May 4, 2008, President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday.   Officers from the Interior Ministry’s State Security Investigations (SSI) department apprehended him on a street in the suburb of New Cairo on May 7, blindfolded him and took him to a police station where they stripped him naked, and beat him intermittently for 12 hours before releasing him without charge.

Before the incident, Maher said, an SSI officer phoned him on April 25 to invite him “for a coffee” on the following day at SSI headquarters in Lazoghli, in downtown Cairo. Maher did not show up.

On May 4, it appeared that few Egyptians had heeded the call for a strike. On May 7, however, as Maher was driving in New Cairo at around 1 p.m., an unmarked van with non-official license plates pulled in front of him. Three other unmarked cars, also with non-official plates, surrounded the car and some 12 men in civilian clothes pulled him into the van, where they handcuffed and blindfolded him.

Maher told Human Rights Watch that the men took him first to the New Cairo police station. There, he was beaten and insulted by men he could not identify because he was blindfolded. Maher said that around the time of the afternoon prayers (4:30 p.m.), his captors took him to SSI headquarters at Lazoghli. There, they stripped him down to his underwear, threatened to rape him with a stick, and continued kicking, beating, and insulting him, and dragging him across the floor. The blows fell mostly on his back and his neck, he said, and he lost some hearing after a sharp blow to one ear. Maher said his assailants wore gloves and applied lotion to his back between beatings in an apparent attempt to reduce bruising.

According to Maher, the officers did not accuse him of anything, but asked for the password of the May 4 Facebook group that news reports said he had started. They also asked him about members of the group he had never met. The SSI officers released him before dawn on May 8 with the warning that he would be beaten more severely the next time State Security detained him.

In another incident a month earlier, Isra’a `Abd al-Fattah, 29, was among roughly 500 people arrested by police nationwide in connection with a call for a strike on April 6. (Most of those arrested were from the industrial Nile Delta city of Mahalla al-Kobra, where demonstrations against rising prices turned violent.) `Abd al-Fattah had also used a social network group on Facebook to publicize the April 6 strike, leading to her detention for more than two weeks. Prosecutors had ordered her release a few days after she was arrested when charges against her of “inciting unrest” were dismissed, but interior ministry officials kept her in detention until April 23.

Tarek Baiassi, whom we’ve written about before, has finally been sentenced, by a Syrian “court” to three years in prison. According to the RSF, the legal-like glass for Tarek’s sentence included “publishing false news” and “weakening national sentiment,” whatever that is. The real reason for the sentence was his having posted an article on the shortcomings of the Syrian secret service on a forum.

Baiassi’s father was incarcerated by the Syrians as a political prisoner.

A petition for Baiassi’s release.

Update: According to The Star (via Blogscapes), Petra has posted bail.

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According to Reuters, Blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin, publisher of Malaysia Today, has “opted to go to jail on Tuesday instead of paying bail after he was accused of sedition for implying the country’s deputy premier had a hand in the murder of a Mongolian woman.”

Raja Petra refused the court’s offer of bail of 5,000 ringgit (806 pounds) until October 6, when the case is scheduled to resume, saying it was a matter of principle.

CPB has a note into Mr. Kamarudin requesting a comment on his decision.