Last Friday, Philip Rizk, a 26-year-old German-Egyptian graduate student at the American University in Cairo, was abducted by officers from Egypt's feared State Security service.
He and a dozen friends had just completed a solidarity march for Gaza through a rural area outside of Cairo. During the march they called for Egypt to open its border crossing with the Gaza Strip, at the town of Rafah. It was a position Rizk had urged time and again on his blog, Tabula Gaza. After the march, police detained them for several hours inside a bus before taking them to a nearby station, say witnesses. There, Philip was separated from the group, thrown into an unmarked van with no license plates and driven off into the night.
For six days, Egypt refused to acknowledge that Philip was in detention or to explain his abduction. No one knew where he was or how he was being treated. He had disappeared.
"We can only makes guesses about why they took him," said Jeanette Rizk, Philip's sister, the night before he was released. "He lived in Gaza for two years and made a documentary about non-violent activism, and during the war he helped get medical supplies to Gaza through Rafah."
"But there has been no official word about why they did it," she added. "They will not even admit to us that they have him, and we are his family."
Within days, the case drew an amount of publicity that must have shocked the Egyptian government. As a German citizen, his Embassy immediately began to work for his release and the story grabbed headlines in German media.
The morning after his abduction, friends and classmates held a small protest outside the Office of the Public Prosecutor in downtown Cairo. By Monday, protests had spread to Egyptian embassies across Europe and North America. Within the last week, The New York Times has run two stories about him.
The phrase on everyone's sign, and the words on everyone's lips, seemed to be "Where is Philip Rizk?"
His release in the early hours of Wednesday provided few concrete answers. Speaking to reporters after his release, Rizk says his police interrogators never told why he was taken or where he was held.
Interrogated for four days, Rizk says police "never touched or physically abused" him, no doubt thanks to his German passport and intensive diplomatic efforts to win his release.
But he was kept handcuffed and blind folded for four days, he says, and kept in a room filled with sounds of torture, though he is unsure if they were recordings of previous torture sessions or abuses actually happening before his blindfolded eyes.
His interrogators variously accused him of spying for Israel, running guns to Hamas and working as a Christian missionary - three charges that would seem mutually exclusive.
"When the interrogation began, the main interrogator said 'Everything that is in your head, we want to take it out. Tell us everything about your life,'" He says.
While the physical location of his detention is unknown, activists say the answer to the question written on protest banners from Cairo to San Francisco is simple: Philip Rizk vanished into the same system of extralegal detention that has ensnared between 5,000 and 20,000 Egyptians in the last several years.
"This is a regular practice of the police in Egypt, sometimes against members of the opposition, or bloggers or demonstrators at protests," says Hafez Abu Sa'ada, the Director of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. "The government uses it to shut down opposition, stop protest or silence demonstrators."
According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, some estimates put the total number of people detained without charge since the emergency law began in 1981 as high as 100,000.
Philip was not the only person detained for his beliefs last Friday, but is widely thought to have become the most high profile because of his German passport and a world wide network of friends ready to protest on his behalf.
Also detained were 23-year-old blogger Dia Eddin Gad, a high school dropout from the city of Tanta who also criticized Egyptian policy towards Gaza on his site, An Angry Voice. The government has provided no news of his whereabouts or wellbeing.
Police arrested as many as 60 members of the country's main opposition group, the banned-but-officially-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood, on the same day. They have not been charged with a crime but are accused of planning to participate in a protest at a later date, according to wire reports.
On the night before Philip's release a motley crew of Egyptian activists and well-heeled students, both local and foreign, from the American University in Cairo staged a protest in front of the Egyptian Journalist's Syndicate.
It is one of the only places in Egypt where public protests are allowed. Nevertheless, the crowd of 100 was faced with a contingent of riot police and plainclothes intelligence officers rapidly taking notes on the participants. The crowd chanted for the release of half a dozen men, but Philip's name was the only one printed on a sea of banners and posters.
"It's very scary," said his sister, Jeannette Rizk, as the sun set over downtown Cairo. "We just want Philip to come home."
The next day he did, but thousands more have yet to be so lucky.