CAIRO (Reuters) - Fourteen Egyptians died in police custody or at the hands of policemen in 2007, up from six in the previous year, the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) said on Wednesday.
The organisation, the main independent group monitoring rights abuses in Egypt, said in an annual report the number of torture cases it had tracked rose in 2007 to 40 from 30 in 2006. The average for the past eight years has been about 28 a year.
But statistics for torture probably reflect only the tip of an iceberg and may not reflect an underlying trend, human rights activists say.
They say torture and abuse are common practice in Egyptian police stations to extract information and confessions.
The government says it prosecutes torturers.
A Ministry of Interior spokesman said he had not seen the EOHR report and had no comment on it.
The 14 deaths in 2007 included that of 12-year-old Mohamed Mamdouh Abdel Rahman who was held in a police station in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura in August 2007 on suspicion of stealing packets of tea from a shop, the EOHR said.
Abdel Rahman spent six days in the station and was then moved to a hospital in a state of emaciation with circular burns on his back and a cut under his armpit, it said. His family took the boy home where he died four days later.
The organisation also included the case of Reda Bakir Shahata, 21, a woman who died while trying to stop a police car taking away her sister-in-law in the Cairo district of Mataria.
"The car started moving and she hung on to the front of the car... The officer ordered the driver to drive on... He drove in a zigzag fashion for more than 100 metres, then she fell under the wheels and died instantly," the report said.
The other deaths were all of men aged between 22 and 45, many of them tradesmen suspected of minor offences. They included a plumber, a carpenter, a barber, a milkman and a coffee shop waiter.
For most categories of human rights abuses, the organisation said it saw no significant improvement from previous years.
It said 2007 was another bad year for media freedom with 22 cases of journalists facing trial for publishing offences, compared with 26 in 2006 and an average of 15 a year since 2002.
The journalists included some of the best known editors in the independent and opposition press.
this is the 12 yr old boy
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