CAIRO (By telephone): Several male and female Saudi scholarship students in Egyptian universities expressed displeasure over what one described as “being ignored by the Cultural Attaché's Office” during the current situation in Egypt. They told Okaz/Saudi Gazette that the Cultural Attaché's Office and the Saudi Embassy did not tell them that the officials designated a hotel where Saudi nationals wanting to return to the Kingdom should meet and that they were provided with little care and help. Muhammad Al-Aqeel, Cultural Attaché at the Saudi Embassy in Cairo, strongly denied that he and his colleagues have not helped the students. He said he slept in his office while working to help students travel home to the Kingdom and that he and his colleagues worked day and night to address the situation. Officials had the students' telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, but they were not able to contact them because telecommunication and Internet networks in Egypt were cut off, Al-Aqeel said, which led them to display the Cultural Attaché Office phone numbers on some satellite TV channels. “I formed a round-the-clock working group with three of my colleagues in order to handle the crisis,” Al-Aqeel said. One student said that they learned about the place where Saudi nationals should gather to be evacuated to the Kingdom “through personal efforts by the students themselves and the Students Club League, which informed us, and then we confirmed this from the Cultural Attaché's Office.” They said they informed Al-Aqeel that their residence in Nasr City was near the airport and that they would go there, but he told them he was not responsible for them and demanded that they come to the hotel, despite the fact that the road was full of demonstrators, people carrying knives and military armored vehicles. Al-Aqeel denied those allegations. The students said they arrived at the hotel amid great fear and anxiety and found Saudi nationals sitting and lying on the floor in what one student called “an indescribable scene”. The students said Saudi officials did not provide them with any protection during their long wait and that they were not given food, blankets or sheets and an embassy worker ignored their request to meet with the ambassador or consul general. “We repeated and insisted upon our demands; they brought us cold, insufficient meals and told us this was all that was available,” one student said. “They told us we would have to look for a restaurant if we wanted more food.” The scholarship students expressed their astonishment at the embassy's claims that it secured buses to take them to the airport. “We had to rent cars at exorbitant charges to take us to the airport, which was merely five kilometers away,” one student said. Al-Aqeel said his office allocated 15 shuttle buses between the October 6 Area and the hotel, which was designated as a meeting point for Saudi nationals. He denied the students' claims that officials did not care about the situation and did not transport them or provide protection and that all the services were only provided to families. “What they said is completely untrue,” Al-Aqeel said. “Not only this, we also transported a number of foreigners having transit visas to the Kingdom. Refuting students' accusations that he ignored their telephone calls, he said, “I left my family and slept in the office; there were more than 10 people to answer the male and female students' calls and at the end, they say I ignored their calls.” Al-Aqeel said he also followed up the situation of female students who said a number of demonstrators were threatening to storm their residence. He said he reassured them that they would not be harmed and that transportation would be provided for them. He denied that the Cultural Attaché's Office was informed about attacks on any Saudi student, except for one secondary school student, who was shot in the chest in his family's home with his mother and sisters in the October 6 Area. Al-Aqeel said there had been 6,000 Saudi students in Egypt and 2,416 of them were evacuated from Cairo to the Kingdom. He said the turmoil came after the examinations in government and private Egyptian universities and that most Saudi students had already left Egypt to spend their vacation with their families in the Kingdom. Students said that once they got to the airport, their ordeal was not over because airport employees demanded money for tickets on free flights directed by King Abdullah to evacuate Saudi nationals. Students said airport workers charged Saudis between 800 and 1500 Egyptian Pounds, about SR510 to SR960, while free tickets were given to Egyptians.
