Latest: Coptic Engineer Sherif Wagih Fahmi Arrested in Alexandria Egypt October 2026

Sherif Wagih Fahmi's young daughter answered the door, and the two men on the landing said they were from the gas company. Her father was asleep, she told them through the closed door, and they told her to wake him. Fahmi did, and the last thing he said to his daughter, his sister Emy told the Christian Post, was that he was going downstairs to settle the gas bill.

He did not come back. By 10 p.m. that night, 5 October 2026, his wife had walked from street to street near their Alexandria home, asking people who had seen the men, and learned her husband had been arrested.

Sherif Wagih Fahmi Alexandria Arrest Gas Company Workers October 5

Relatives may leave food, clothes and other basic items at the police station on Tuesdays and Fridays, the Christian Post reports. They are not allowed to see him or talk to him by phone. The family does not know how Fahmi is being treated.

When his wife brought money so he could buy food at the canteen, an officer told her he knew Fahmi liked his tea with two spoonfuls of sugar. Emy said the family could not tell what he was hinting at. That small, strange exchange is reported as the sister's account, and this article draws no conclusion from it beyond what she said: the family heard it, and did not know what it meant.

The family hired a lawyer, and the case has a number, Emy said, according to the Christian Post. The lawyer has yet to share the details. Priests who intervened were told Fahmi would be freed after two or three weeks.

The family has heard nothing since, the Christian Post reports. Emy has spoken about the case on independent media programmes, and some lawyers have told her to stop posting and talking about it, the Christian Post adds. She has kept speaking anyway, and her words carry the weight of a sister who watched a door close and has not yet seen it open again.

Egypt Article 98f Blasphemy Charge and 14 Arrested Since September

What Fahmi is charged with is reported in two wordings that need to be kept apart. Emy said her brother was charged with publishing false information on the internet, the Christian Post reports. CathoNews says authorities have charged him under Article 98(f) of Egypt's Penal Code, which criminalises any use of religion to promote or advocate extremist ideologies with a view toward stirring up sedition, disparaging or showing contempt for any divinely revealed religion, or prejudicing national unity and social harmony.

The Christian Post also quotes Article 98(f) in those same terms. It is possible that both wordings describe the same case from different angles, but neither report publishes a charge sheet, and this article does not treat the two descriptions as one confirmed charge. The charge, as reported, rests on the family's and the watchdogs' accounts.

His post, on Emy's account, dealt with what she called the Islamization of education in Egypt. Fahmi was upset that schools had dropped the national anthem at morning assembly in favour of a religious one, she said, according to the Christian Post. She added that the state plans to bring in kuttabs, or Quranic schools, and that every student, Muslim or not, would be expected to learn roughly one-quarter of the Quran by heart.

Those are the sister's descriptions of her brother's post and of the education changes, reported by the Christian Post. No copy of the post itself is published in either report, and no Egyptian authority's response to the arrest appears in either report. Readers should therefore treat the account of what Fahmi wrote as his family's account, not as a verified quotation.

Both reports place the arrest inside a wider pattern. Fourteen people have been arrested in Egypt since September for voicing beliefs outside Islam, the Christian Post reports, and CathoNews gives the same figure: since September, 14 people have been arrested for expressing non-Islamic beliefs. Emy listed other people held for their views, the Christian Post reports, including Augustine Samaan, Romany Gharib, Saeed Abu Mostafa and six young men tied to a play called "Khalawis." "There is no freedom of belief or freedom of expression in Egypt," she said.

Mahmoud Shalaby, a regional researcher at Amnesty International, said earlier this year that Egyptian authorities "must stop criminalizing discussions about religious beliefs," the Christian Post reports, quoting Amnesty. CathoNews quotes the same Amnesty statement and adds that Christian Solidarity Worldwide has voiced disapproval of the growing threat to freedoms of religion or belief and expression.

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Sherif Wagih Fahmi's daughter is still waiting for a father who went downstairs to settle a gas bill. His wife still walks the same streets near their home, his sister still speaks on programmes lawyers told her to avoid, and a lawyer still holds a case number whose details have not been shared. Whether the next Tuesday or Friday drop-off brings a visit, a phone call, or only another parcel left at a desk, is the question the family wakes up to, and the one no report so far has answered.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.