The Hungarian tortured to death in Yemen went there to marry a local girl

Further details were revealed about the fate of György Koltai, who was abducted, tortured, and reportedly died due to the coronavirus infection in his cell. Blikk reached the head of a Yemeni human rights organisation that tried to put together the last weeks of the life of the Hungarian man.

György Koltai, who had previously been imprisoned and tortured, travelled back to Yemen to marry the sister of a former fellow prisoner, Yemeni human rights activist Tawfik al-Hamidi, who knew Hungarians who had converted to the Muslim faith, they told Blikk.

I have known György, ie Abdul Hakim, for a long time because we worked in a similar field. […] I helped him organise interviews with Arabic TV channels, but I also visited Hungary, where we had lunch at his mother’s house,

said Tawfik al-Hamidi, head of Geneva-based human rights organisation SAM.

After al-Hamidi saw that Koltai had returned to Yemen, he could not contact him. The reason for this was recently revealed when a local activist, Adel al-Husseini, told Twitter that

a Hungarian man with Yemeni citizenship had been captured and practically tortured to death

by the people of the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which controlled the south of the country. Al-Hamidi and his organisation then began investigating the details.

“It’s not easy to get information. We got sound recordings from people who were with George in prison. […] They are afraid, so they could not tell everything with full openness. The sound recordings were also sent in secret,”

al-Hamidi said.

In the audio recordings, the liberated Yemenis said that Koltai was captured by the Aden anti-terror squad. A certain Yisran al-Maktari, the leader of the local anti-terrorist squad, is responsible for the arrests and interrogations.

“The conditions were terrible. Some of the cells were so cramped that the prisoners were virtually unable to turn around,”

Tawfik al-Hamidi explained.

Koltai was brutally tortured in prison, according to testimonies, almost all of his teeth were knocked out, and then when he caught the coronavirus, he was simply left to die. What his interrogators wanted from him can only be assumed. According to al-Hamidi, it is conceivable that he was arrested just because he was a foreigner.