Washington Post: The next day, Said's mother was notified that her son was at the morgue. The cause of death, she was told, was severe cardiovascular asphyxiation caused by a high level of drugs in his system. The initial police report received by the family said Said had apparently died after he swallowed a bag that contained marijuana. Finding that account suspicious, relatives bribed a guard at the morgue to take a photo of the corpse. It showed Said's skull had been cracked and his face disfigured. After local prosecutors expressed little interest in pursuing the case, Kassem, who was a father figure to Said, began holding news conferences. Said's cousins created a page on Facebook to expose what they called police brutality. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/08/AR2011020806360.html
The National (United Arab Emirates): Witnesses said the two men attacked Said as he entered an internet cafe opposite his home and beat him to death. Two state post-mortems determined that he died of suffocation from swallowing a packet of drugs, however. Said's death, and a photograph taken by his older brother Ahmed, showing him covered with bruises, his teeth broken and jaw smashed, caused an outcry across Egypt. More than 225,000 people have joined a group called "We are all Khaled" on Facebook and many members of the social networking site have put his picture as their profile pictures. http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/africa/undercover-police-arrested-over-beating-death-of-egyptian-man
Almasry Alyoum: Al-Masry Al-Youm has obtained a copy of records of the investigation into the killing of Alexandrian Khaled Saeed, which show surprising findings by the appeals prosecution services... When Saeed’s mother returned to give a testimony for the second time, she stressed that she saw her son’s corpse at the morgue six hours after he had been killed. “He was on the trolley, wearing white shorts and a black T-shirt, barefooted, injured in the face and the back of his head, bleeding from his knees, hands, and feet, and he had broken teeth,” she said. ًWhen asked about the photos taken of the body, she said that Saeed’s brother took them on his mobile phone while he was at the morgue at 3:00 AM. She added that she has not since seen her son, and called for a new autopsy, describing the medical examiners’ report as incorrect. http://www.almasryalyoum.com/node/55686
NATO Review: A police report claimed he had died after swallowing a bag of marijuana. But Said’s family obtained photos of his battered corpse from a morgue guard. His jaw, twisted out of shape by a policeman’s boot, was enough proof of a cover-up. So in defiance of the Egyptian authorities, the photos were published online by Said’s cousins. They became a shocking, viral sensation. http://www.nato.int/docu/review/2011/Social_Medias/Egypt_Facebook/EN/index.htm
SFGate: Had it not been for a leaked morgue photo of his mangled corpse, tenacious relatives and the power of Facebook, the death of Khaled Said would have become a footnote in the annals of Egyptian police brutality. Instead, outrage over the beating death of the 28-year-old man in this coastal city last summer, and attempts by local authorities to cover it up, helped spark the mass protests demanding the ouster of Egypt's authoritarian president....Finding that account suspicious, relatives bribed a guard at the morgue to take a photo of the corpse. It showed that Said's skull had been cracked and his face disfigured. After local prosecutors expressed little interest in pursuing the case, Kassem, who was a father figure to Said, began holding news conferences. Said's cousins created a page on Facebook to expose what they called police brutality.http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-02-10/news/27740387_1_police-brutality-internet-cafe-morgue
ABCNews: Said's family told ABC News it was too dangerous for them to speak out now because of police stationed near their home, but his mother has posted on-line videos to protest the long delay in prosecuting the two police officers charged with her son's murder. Social media and on-line videos have played a huge role in publicizing alleged police abuses in Egypt in recent years.http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/egypt-face-launched-revolution/story?id=12841488&page=2
CNN: The photo of Khaled Said's beaten, bloodied, fractured face went viral online. The Egyptian man was allegedly beaten to death by police outside an internet café. He reportedly had possession of a video showing police selling illegal drugs. Saleh and others were shocked. Soon they had created a Facebook page. The name: "We Are All Khaled Said." Google employee Wael Ghonim, working at night online from Dubai, headed this effort. Administering the site anonymously under the pseudonym "el shaheed," which is Arabic for "the martyr," he filled the page with news about police abuse and torture...Soon, there were Facebook-organized protests to show support for Khaled Said.http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/21/egypt.internet.revolution/index.html
Sandmonkey.org (Wael Ghonim's website): When the story went out, and people saw the pictures, they were of course enraged. About a 1000 people gathered after the Friday prayers to protest in front of the police stations, and there are plans to do sit ins and demos this entire week, demanding that people take action, before they become the next Khaled.http://www.sandmonkey.org/2010/06/13/on-khaled-said/
CNN: Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the U.N. atomic agency and now an Egyptian reformist figure, joined thousands of people in Alexandria on Friday to protest the death of an Egyptian man and shine a light on police brutality. Khaled Said died after police dragged him out of an internet cafe in Alexandria on June 6 -- a fatality that has since become a lightning rod for human rights activists...A photograph of his pummeled face is on a Facebook page devoted to him....The death has sparked other demonstrations in Egypt in which crowds were forcibly dispersed and some were arrested, the group said...http://articles.cnn.com/2010-06-25/world/egypt.police.beating_1_brutality-mohamed-elbaradei-egyptian?_s=PM:WORLD
Human Rights Watch: "Witness accounts and the photographs of Khaled Said's mangled face constitute strong evidence that plainclothes security officers beat him in a vicious and public manner," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "All those involved should be speedily interrogated, and the prosecutor should fully investigate what caused the fractures and trauma clearly evident on his body." Photos of Said's battered and deformed face published on the internet show a fractured skull, dislocated jaw, broken nose, and numerous other signs of trauma. Khaled's brother, Ahmed Said, confirmed the authenticity of the pictures to Human Rights Watch. Nine witnesses came forward to describe the beating.http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/06/24/egypt-prosecute-police-beating-death
Daily Beast: Ghonim’s Facebook page started as a small campaign against police brutality but quickly mushroomed into an all-out effort against human-rights abuses in Egypt...Ghonim described himself as an amateur activist who was inspired to create the page after seeing photos of how the blogger, Khaled Said, had been brutally beaten to death and his maimed body left in the street. “That killed me. I felt in pain. And I wanted to do something,” he said. “It happened that I created this page, and it happened that 375,000 people [are] on it. So I'm using it to reveal the truth that the government is trying to hide.”http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-02-07/google-executive-wael-ghonim-admits-he-was-el-shaheed/
Jadaliyya (Arab Studies Institute publication): [The online activists] Facebook activities also included a commitment to demanding justice for the brutal killing of one of their own, Khaled Said. It was striking last October how every youth I encountered in and out of the university was talking about Khaled Said. His story, which came out of Facebook, not Al-Jazeera, the newspaper, or any other media, has by now received much international coverage... His family released a photograph to an activist of the broken, bloodied, and disfigured face from Khaled’s corpse. This photo, and a portrait of the gentle soft skinned face of the living Khaled, went viral. The power of photographic evidence combined with eyewitness accounts and popular knowledge of police brutality left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was senselessly and brutally murdered by police officers, the very people who are supposed to act in the interest of public safety. A Facebook page, “We are all Khaled Said” was set up and we now know that activists from the Facebook group 6 of April Youth Movement, and Google executive Wael Ghoneim who is becoming a national hero as instigator of the Day of Rage (see below), were involved in this. The page led to a movement, first for justice to bring the killers to court to pay for their crime, and then, something much bigger. On the heels of the Tunisian revolution and fleeing of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the “We are all Khaled Said” group called for a Day of Rage, a march against “Torture, Corruption, Poverty and Unemployment” for January 25, 2011, the date the Regime designated to “celebrate” the police...The uprising took off in a way that no one anticipated.http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/612/egypts-revolution-2.0_the-facebook-factor
Newsweek: That month,a young Alexandria businessman named Khaled Said, who had posted a video on the Web showing cops pilfering pot from a drug bust, was assaulted at an Internet café by local police. They dragged him outside and beat him to death in broad daylight. Photos of his battered corpse went viral. Ghonim was moved by the photos to start a new Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said,” to which he began devoting the bulk of his efforts. The page quickly became a forceful campaign against police brutality in Egypt, with a constant stream of photos, videos, and news. Ghonim’s interactive style, combined with the page’s carefully calibrated posts—emotional, apolitical, and broad in their appeal—quickly turned it into one of Egypt’s largest activist sites. On Jan. 14, protests in Tunisia felled that country’s longstanding dictator, and Ghonim was inspired to announce, on Facebook, a revolution of Egypt’s own. Each of the page’s 350,000-plus fans was cordially invited to a protest on Jan. 25. They could click “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” to signal whether they’d like to attend. In the space of three days, more than 50,000 people answered “yes.” Posing as El Shaheed in a Gmail chat, Ghonim was optimistic but cautioned that online support might not translate into a revolt in the streets...Ghonim implored his Facebook fans to spread word of the protest to people on the ground, and he and other activists constantly coordinated efforts, combining online savvy with the street activism long practiced by the country’s democracy movements. Ghonim seemed to view the page both as a kind of central command and a rallying point—getting people past “the psychological barrier.” http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/the-facebook-freedom-fighter.html
Wired: When Khaled Said died, Ghonim said, the government claimed he’d choked on hash. But the internet allowed dissenters to counter those claims online, and as their voices grew, the government lost its power of deception, Ghonim said. Ghonim, as the anonymous administrator of the Khaled Said Facebook page, invited people to join the page and share their voices and suggestions for action. Within a few days, thousands of people had signed up. “It was an amazing story how everyone started feeling the ownership, everyone was an owner in this page,” Ghonim said. “People started contributing ideas.” Someone suggested a silent protest, where people dressed in black would gather in the street, turn their faces to the sea and stand silently for an hour before dispersing and going home. “People were making fun of the idea,” Ghonim said. But then thousands of protesters showed up in Alexandria. “It was great because it connected people from the virtual world, bringing them to the real world, sharing the same dream the same frustration the same anger the same desire for freedom,” he said. Then came the Tunisian uprising, which helped tip Egypt into its own revolution. Ghonim’s Facebook page again became a central point for expressing frustration. “Everything was done by the people to the people, and that’s the power of the internet,” he says. “There was no leader. The leader was everyone on that page.”...“People were so empowered … and now asking for their rights,” he said. “Extremism became tolerance. Who would imagine before the 25th if I tell you that hundreds of thousands of Christians are going to pray, and tons of thousands of Muslims are going to protect them, and then hundreds of thousands of Muslims are going to pray and tons of thousands of Christians are going to protect them.” When he saw what was happening he knew it was the beginning of the end and returned to his Facebook page to post a note.http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/wael-ghonim-at-ted/
News sources on the investigation and trial of the police
