Alaa Ahmed Seif Abd-El Fattah (, ; born 18 November 1981), known professionally as Alaa Abd El-Fattah (), is an Egyptian-British blogger, software developer and a political activist. He has been active in developing Arabic-language versions of software and platforms. He was imprisoned in Egypt for allegedly organising a political protest without requesting authorization, though he was released on bail on 23 March 2014. He was rearrested and ordered released on bail again on 15 September 2014, subsequently sentenced to a month of jail in absentia, and received a five-year sentence in February 2015, which he was released from in late March 2019. Abd El-Fattah remained subject to a five-year parole period, requiring him to stay at a police station for 12 hours daily, from evening until morning. On 29 September, during the 2019 Egyptian protests, Abd El-Fattah was arrested by the National Security Agency and taken to State Security Prosecution on charges that were unknown . He was subsequently convicted of "spreading fake news" and jailed for five years. In April 2022 he began a hunger strike. Background Abd El-Fattah was born on 18 November 1981 in Cairo, Egypt. He was raised in a family of well-known Egyptian activists. His father, Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hamad, a human rights attorney who had been arrested in 1983 by State Security Investigations Service officers and tortured and imprisoned for five years, is one of the founders of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. His mother Laila Soueif, the sister of the novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif, is a professor of mathematics at Cairo University and a political activist. His parents' activism began in the Anwar Sadat era. During a demonstration in 2005, his mother and other women, were attacked by Mubarak supporters; Abd El-Fattah was said to have protected her. One of his sisters is Mona Seif, a founding member of 'No Military Trials for Civilians', a group raising awareness for the civilian detainees summoned by military prosecutors and investigating torture allegations involving military police. His other sister, Sanaa Seif, is an activist and film editor who co-founded a newspaper about the Arab spring called 'Gornal'. Political activism and arrests Abd El-Fattah co-founded with his wife Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan (daughter of activist Bahi El-Din Hassan), the Egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa and Omraneya, the first Arab blog aggregators that did not restrict inclusion based on the content of the blog. In 2005,