Mansoura, Egypt - Audio recitation of Koran verses can be heard all day at the poor country house in the Egyptian village of Shouha near Mansoura town. The 40-year-old dressed in black sits motionless on a simple sofa - waiting for justice.
Sa'ieda Souror's 12-year-old son Mohamed Mamdouh Abdel-Aziz died days after he was arrested and allegedly tortured by police after he was detained on suspicion of having stolen four packs of tea.
His family allege his death on August 12 was as a result of torture at a police station in Dakahliya province about 120 kilometres from the capital Cairo.
Details and video images related to the case have made headlines and caused outrage in Egypt. Several human rights agencies have demanded an investigation into the highly-publicized case.
In an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Sourer detailed the case, saying prosecutors burst into tears when they saw her son's distorted body shortly after he died.
The poor and illiterate mother has also alleged that high-ranking government officials offered her money in exchange for silence. But she resisted, vowing to seek justice.
"When I was offered money to keep silent, I said: 'I'm not selling my child's blood,'" she told dpa
Souror said she was "shocked to death" when she saw Mohamed three days after he was detained at Mansoura police station while visiting her 20-year-old son, Ibrahim, who was also being held for possessing a knife.
The child had "burns spread all over his little body and a big, bloody hole on his back," the distressed mother said. "Mohamed identified and named the two policemen, who had beaten him up and tortured him with electrocution," she cried out.
Souror said nothing at the police station that day to protect the older son from possible persecution. But she rushed to lawyer Hamdi al-Baz who found Mohamed in poor physical condition when he went to the police station.
After al-Baz intervened, the child was admitted to Mansoura public hospital, where he spent four days.
"On the fifth day, after his wounds reached a deadly state out of negligence, he was thrown away for our neighbours to find him spending the whole night lying unconscious at a parking lot near the hospital. They brought him home," Souror said through tears.
"The doctors who examined him to issue his death certificate suspected that he died of unnatural causes and advised me to go to the prosecutor," she said. Prosecutors had his body transferred to the Mansoura University Hospital morgue.
"At the hospital, high-raking local officials and policemen tried to bribe me and other times to threaten me so as not to file a complaint," Souror said, adding she was offered 1,000 Egyptian pounds (about 175 dollars).
Egypt's Interior Ministry said in a statement that claims by the family that the child had been subjected to torture were mere allegations and that a preliminary autopsy showe pulmonary infection to have been the cause of death.
Souror refused to accept this and declined to have Mohamed's body released from the morgue until further investigation. She did not accept condolences either. But, without her knowledge, police carried his body from the hospital to the family's cemetary and buried it.
Policemen, a parliamentarian and the mayor witnessed the burial while Mohamed's brother Ibrahim sat in the back of a police truck, the family alleges.
Al-Baz included video footage filmed by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood movement and released on various internet websites, in the case file.
Ibrahim has meanwhile also alleged he was tortured by police who threatened to fabricate a drugs charge against him if he refused to testify that burn marks on his brother's body resulted from an electric cable that fell on him six months before his detention.
He agreed and was released after a month, thinking his brother was still alive.
On August 21, Souror's persistence paid off when the prosecutor general in Cairo ordered medical examiners to exhume Mohamed's body and conduct an autopsy. Results are expected in the coming days.
Egypt's Assistant District Attorney in Mansoura, Hani Haraz, has declined to comment on the case, saying he had received it one day before the autopsy.
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) has said the handful of cases that have come to public attention lately, were just the tip of an iceberg.
A recent EOHR report said 567 suspected cases of torture at police stations,including 167 deaths, have been documented between 1993 and 2007.
