CAIRO (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- An Egyptian filmmaker imprisoned over a music video that mocked President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi died at a maximum-security facility on Friday after two years in detention without trial, his lawyer said.

The cause of death of the filmmaker, Shady Habash, 24, was not immediately clear. But it brought new scrutiny to conditions in Egypt’s notoriously crowded prisons, where the death of an American this year caused a rare rift with the Trump administration, and which have been the subject of growing calls for a mass release of prisoners to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Habash was imprisoned in March 2018 after he directed a music video by an exiled musician, Ramy Essam, that mocked el-Sissi as a “date.” When the video spread widely on social media, Habash was arrested and jailed, said his lawyer, Ahmed el-Khawaga.

The writer of the song, Galal el-Behairy, was also arrested and charged, as was a third man who set up Essam’s Facebook page. In August 2018, a military court sentenced el-Behairy to three years’ imprisonment.

Essam, the singer, became popular during the Arab Spring, but later fled to Sweden after he was briefly detained. He hired Habash, who had worked with other musicians, to make his video about el-Sissi.

In a letter from prison in October that was later published by friends on Facebook, Habesh spoke of his despair. “Prison doesn’t kill, loneliness does,” he wrote, describing what he called his struggle to “stop yourself going mad or dying slowly because you’ve been thrown in a room two years ago and forgotten.”

Political prisoners in Egypt are often held for years without trial, frequently in what rights groups say are dirty, overcrowded conditions. In March, Amnesty International called on el-Sissi to release thousands of prisoners who are vulnerable to an outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

El-Sissi released 4,000 prisoners last month, in a traditional gesture of clemency for Sinai Liberation Day, marking Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai in 1982. But those released were convicted criminals, and political prisoners were not included.

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