Al Shaheed

The “martyr” a.k.a Khaled Saeed facebook Page

There is no doubt that Khaled Saeed Page on facebook was one of the main drives of the success of the January 25 revolution in Egypt, and maybe Tunisia Revolution too.

On the 25^th of January, “We are all Khaled Saeed” page on fb had more than 600,000 followers, and during the following 18 days it jumped to a staggering +1,000,000 followers. While the actual impact of Khaled’s page on the revolution cannot be determined, it was this page which first published a call to protest on January 25th and throughout the revolution protesters carried banners and posters displaying the photograph of Saaed’s disfigured dead body.

The page has been named one of the catalysts of the 2011 Egyptian protests, and in Tunisia activist and revolutionaries said it even inspired the Tunisian Revolution, a month preceding the Egyptian Revolt. The page was a key force in urging the youth to go down and join the protests, and it succeed greatly in motivating and activating the young soldiers of the revolt. On February 11, 2011, these protests resulted in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power. But how? And more importantly, why did this particular page succeed in doing what many others failed at?

To understand how a fb page triggered 2 revolutions, we must know a little background about Khaled Saeed himself and then his fb page.

Khaled Mohamed Saeed was a young Egyptian man who died under disputed circumstances in the Sidi Gaber area of Alexandria on June 6, 2010, after being arrested by Egyptian police. Khaled (God bless him), an unemployed Alexandrian, was sitting in a cybercafe, when two police detectives from the Sidi Gaber police station entered the premises and arrested him. He was then reportedly tortured to death in the doorway of the building across the street, and in front a number of witnesses. No one knows why the police officers killed the young man, and quite frankly it is irrelevant, because there is no justification for the murder whatsoever.

But why is this torture case different than many others that were revealed in Egypt, during the past decade?