A dissident who has spent five years in a Cairo jail has said he is ready to give up his British citizenship in despair at the government’s inability to secure his release. 

Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a British-Egyptian activist and blogger, has spent hundreds of days on hunger strike to raise awareness of his case. 

He was sentenced to half a decade in prison in December 2021 on charges of spreading fake news. 

Despite now having served his five years including pre-trial detention, Fattah has still not been released. 

His family has now given permission for some of his private letters to be published following his continued ‘illegal incarceration’.

In one sent on December 4, Fattah reflected on Sir Keir Starmer meeting the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. 

He wrote according to The Guardian: ‘I wonder if he’s paying any attention to me.

‘I’ve said from the start that if they can’t or don’t want to or don’t care to argue about a consular visit then one can’t look to them for a release, because it means they basically don’t recognise me as citizen and they endorse the local authority not recognising me as a human being.

‘So probably the next step is to give up both nationalities and live without either (optimistic, of course, since this assumes life in some future stage).’

It comes as his 68-year-old mother Laila Soueif is on hunger strike and protesting daily outside Downing Street seeking his release. 

She has been told she in serious danger of having a heart attack after losing 21kg on a 122-day hunger strike.  

Foreign secretary David Lammy also reportedly made the case for Fattah’s release during a meeting with his Egyptian counterpart last week. 

In 2022, the UN demanded Egypt immediately release Fattah after he was on hunger strike for seven months. 

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turks said Fattah’s life was in great danger’, adding: ‘His dry hunger strike puts his life at acute risk.’ 

Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said when he was in office that he hoped to see the issue resolved as soon as possible. 

However, Fattah’s sister Sanaa Seif said Britain had not replied to her request for proof that her brother was alive.

‘I asked the British authorities to get us some proof that Alaa is alive and conscious, I did not get any response.’

Fattah rose to prominence during Egypt’s 2011 popular uprising which led to Egypt’s first democratic presidential election. 

The new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Mursi, was toppled by the military – then led by Sisi – after mass protests against his rule in July 2013.

The following month security forces broke up two pro-Mursi sit-ins in Cairo and killed hundreds of civilians.

Fattah, a software developer from an activist family, was detained in the subsequent crackdown on Islamists, leftists and liberals alike, and has been behind bars for most of the time since then.