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16,000 jailed in Egypt’s round-up

CAIRO — Egypt’s crackdown on Islamists has jailed 16,000 people over the past eight months in the country’s biggest round-up in nearly two decades, according to previously unreleased figures from security officials.

Rights activists say reports of abuses in prisons are mounting, with prisoners describing systematic beatings and miserable conditions for dozens packed into tiny cells.

The Egyptian government has not released official numbers for those arrested in the sweeps since the military ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in July. But four senior officials — two from the Interior Ministry and two from the military — gave a count of 16,000, including about 3,000 top- or mid-level members of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood.

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The count, which is consistent with recent estimates by human rights groups, was based on a tally kept by the Interior Ministry to which the military also has access.

It includes hundreds of women and minors, though the officials could not give exact figures. The officials released the figures on condition of anonymity because the government has not released them. The flood of arrests has swamped prisons and the legal system. Many are held for months in police station lockups meant as temporary holding areas or in impromptu jails set up in police training camps because prisons are overcrowded. Inmates are kept for months without charge.

The government says the police, run by the Interior Ministry, have changed their ways from the era of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, when the security forces became notorious for torture and corruption. Now, officials say, there is no tolerance for abuses.

The assistant interior minister for human rights, Major General Abu Bakr Abdel-Karim, told the newspaper Al-Watan in an interview last month that ‘‘it is possible that there is some use of cruelty’’ and said anyone claiming to be maltreated should file a complaint with either the ministry or the general prosecutors’ office. But he said so far there had been no proof presented of maltreatment.

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Associated Press