Battle royale: How Egypt’s anti-terror traps are dooming teen gamers
Egyptian investigators are notorious for clamping down on political dissent. Now teenagers are being imprisoned for ‘terrorism’ – often without trial – after falling victim to online manipulation.
Aminah Mohie el Din in Cairo
Over the past 18 months, Egyptian authorities have detained 15 children aged 12 to 17 on terror charges, according to human rights groups. The path to their detention almost always starts with online video games.
In August 2024, 17-year-old Mohamed Emad was lying on his bed in Cairo playing PUBG when Egyptian security forces banged on his family’s door. Officers swept in, ransacked rooms, seized the building’s CCTV footage, and took him away. The family had been visiting relatives in Cairo for the summer from their home in Maryland, United States.
Emad reappeared in court 10 days later. The Supreme State Security Prosecution, a special department of the public prosecutor’s office, charged him with joining a terrorist group. Amnesty International describes that department as part of a parallel justice system that misuses counterterrorism laws to detain people for acts that should not be criminalised. “He was never politically active, never had any ideology. Just an ordinary kid dividing his time between school and online games,” said one of his lawyers, who requested anonymity. Emad remains in detention.
PUBG – PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – is an online survival game similar to Fortnite, in which players chat, form teams, and exchange virtual rewards such as weapons, gear, or in-game currency.
A Telegram link promising in-game weapons led another 15-year-old into a group that was instead calling for protests. He left the group at once but was arrested the same day in July 2024.
Fearing that national security agents were monitoring their communications, his parents refused to share any details about his 17 months in pretrial detention. A family friend told to The Continent on condition of anonymity: “He knows nothing about politics yet was accused of spreading rumours and joining a banned group.”
Cycle and recycle of harm
Fourteen Egyptian and international human rights groups describe arrests, disappearances, and terrorism charges without evidence relating to 12 other children. The groups, including the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Refugees Platform in Egypt and the World Organisation Against Torture, call for the children to be immediately released. They are often detained with adults, in violation of both Egyptian and international law.
“Every case follows the same script. Only the children’s names, ages, and governorates differ. But the bait, the arrests, and the charges are nearly identical,” said Sara Mohamed, who heads a programme against arbitrary detentions at the Middle East Democracy Centre.
Some of the children’s families turned to the centre for legal assistance. They describe a similar pattern: children first encounter recruiters inside game chats, then are steered to Telegram groups that pose as co-ordination hubs for play. From there, they are pushed toward small online tasks. “They were promised in-game rewards – extra followers or virtual currency – in exchange for posting certain content on TikTok or Facebook,” Mohamed said.
She said the children appeared to be victims of a systematic recruitment operation that manipulated them into posting political slogans, insults directed at Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, calls to open Gaza’s Rafah crossing, or other material Egyptian security interprets as extremist. Mohamed argues the Egyptian government should be protecting these children from online recruitment instead of detaining them.
In court, the cases against the children rest entirely on what national security investigators claim. “We are denied access to case files. How can we defend them without knowing the evidence?” said a lawyer representing one of the children.
In any case, many of the children have not yet faced trial. “Pretrial detention is extended for months – even over a year – often through electronic renewals without bringing them physically before a judge,” the lawyers said. The practice is so common in Egypt that it has a name: tadweer (“recycling”).
In August, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk called Egyptian authorities out on this practice, saying they are using it as a systematic tool against political detainees. As of June 2025, more than 60,000 political detainees were in prison without trial.
Opposition politician and former MP Ziad el-Elaimy spent two years in pretrial detention and almost a year in prison for “spreading false news” before being pardoned. He said the damage was doubled for children.
“They lack criminal intent, they are held illegally with adults, and their futures are being stolen. Detaining kids over games or opinions doesn’t make Egypt safer. It only sows more anger, distortion, and perhaps future violence.”
The gaming-linked cases are not the first example of Egyptian authorities failing to account for children’s rights in their operations. Between 2013 and 2019, in the crackdown on dissent that followed the Arab Spring protests, Egyptian authorities reportedly arrested and detained hundreds of children.
A 2020 Human Rights Watch report highlighted 20 cases of jailed children, 14 of whom said they had suffered torture in detention. In one case, a 17-year-old was sentenced to death – a ruling later commuted.
The Continent contacted Egypt’s National Security Agency and the PUBG development team for comment, but received no response.
El-Elaimy said Egypt’s entire security and legal strategy needed rethinking. “What we need is a ministry of interior and a public prosecution that work to build social peace – not merely to pursue people with detention and suspicion.”