Muslim Brotherhood members detained in the UAE on charges of conspiring against the state live in air-conditioned, well-furnished rooms and are served “five-star” food brought in from the best of the country’s hotels, a human rights group said on Tuesday.
Members of the UAE Human Rights Association (HRA) visited the detainees who are said to be in the custody of the federal Public Prosecution in the capital Abu Dhabi.
HRA chairman Abdel Ghaffar Hussein said members of the rights group were “pleased” by what they witnessed and that the detainees were not tortured as some international human rights groups have claimed.
In August, the Human Rights Watch called for an end to what said was “disturbing human rights developments in the United Arab Emirates, where the authorities have launched a campaign of arrest, arbitrary detention and deportation to repress and intimidate peaceful political activists.”
A member of Al Islah group, an Islamist organization linked the Muslim Brotherhood, claimed in a report by the Guardian that members of the group were being tortured.
But Hussein said Human Rights Watch reports were unfounded and had “their own political agenda,” according to the UAE-based The National.
“The delegates from the association who visited the detainees found their rooms to be good, with air conditioning, a good bed, and the food was available and very good and comes from five-star hotels,” Hussein said.
“They also have access to health services 24 hours a day and can speak to their families twice a week.”
“And what made us very happy was that treatment of all of them is equal; no one is treated differently,” he said. “Keeping in mind that one of detainees is a relative of a ruling family in the UAE,” Hussein said as quoted by The National.
Jamila Al Hamili, a member of HRA’s board of directors, said, “Most of the things on Twitter are not true.” “There are some who want to distort reality; this is something we need to be careful of.”
She explained that investigation found that a twitter account reportedly belonging to one of the detainees was fake and that it was created after he had been arrested.
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