{"id":31542,"date":"2017-01-02T22:37:45","date_gmt":"2017-01-02T22:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/egypt-official-accused-of-corruption-kills\/"},"modified":"2017-01-02T22:37:20","modified_gmt":"2017-01-02T22:37:20","slug":"egypt-official-accused-of-corruption-kills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/egypt-official-accused-of-corruption-kills\/","title":{"rendered":"Egypt official accused of corruption ‘kills himself’"},"content":{"rendered":"

{A top Egyptian government official has killed himself in jail after being arrested in connection with a corruption investigation, reports say.}<\/p>\n

Wael Shalaby was a former secretary general of Egypt’s administrative courts system. He resigned on Saturday, a day before his arrest.<\/p>\n

The public prosecutor said his arrest was part of an inquiry into accusations of officials receiving bribes.<\/p>\n

A gag order on all media over the corruption case has now been issued.<\/p>\n

Mr Shalaby’s resignation came after a procurement manager at Egypt’s State Council, the umbrella organisation for the country’s administrative courts, was arrested.<\/p>\n

Gamal al-Din al-Labban was charged with receiving bribes worth millions of Egyptian pounds.<\/p>\n

The public prosecutor has referred to the two arrests as part of the same case.
\nAlongside his role in the State Council, Mr Shalaby also served as a deputy chief justice in the administrative courts, according to the Reuters news agency.<\/p>\n

{{‘Terrible psychological state’}}<\/p>\n

Mr Shalaby’s lawyer, Sayed Beheiry, told Reuters that his client hanged himself using a scarf he was wearing.<\/p>\n

“He was going through a terrible psychological state during his questioning,” he said.
\n“It is very hard to be a big important judge and suddenly you lose everything and sit in front of an investigator being accused of taking a bribe.”<\/p>\n

The lawyer told the Daily News Egypt newspaper that his client was subjected to interrogations that deprived him of sleep for nearly 40 hours.<\/p>\n

Mr Shalaby, he added, had also said his arrest was illegal, because prosecutors had not issued an arrest warrant.<\/p>\n

{{Gag order}}<\/p>\n

The interior ministry, which oversees prisons, has not commented. The public prosecutor has ordered an autopsy, state news agency Mena reports.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the death was confirmed, Egypt’s Prosecutor-General Nabil Sadek placed a gag order on the case until the investigations are concluded.<\/p>\n

Local and foreign non-governmental organisations say corruption is rife in Egypt.The country was ranked 88th out of 168 countries on Transparency International’s 2015 corruption perceptions index.<\/p>\n

\"Mr<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{A top Egyptian government official has killed himself in jail after being arrested in connection with a corruption investigation, reports say.} Wael Shalaby was a former secretary general of Egypt’s administrative courts system. He resigned on Saturday, a day before his arrest. The public prosecutor said his arrest was part of an inquiry into accusations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[249],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-31542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-bbc"],"bylines":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"contributors":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31542"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=31542"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=31542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}