Thaer Al-Nashef, a vociferous opponent of President Bashar Assad's regime, said his wife, Mona Al-Gharib, was found by an elderly woman who used Al-Gharib's cell phone to call her mother.
"I haven't seen her yet, I'm not sure about her condition, but the woman who called said she seemed weak," Al-Nashef said, declining to give more details as he was on his way to see her.
The Syrian Embassy in Egypt strongly denied the abduction claim, calling it "lies fabricated by Syrian dissidents in Egypt" seeking to harm Syrian-Egyptian relations.
An Egyptian police official confirmed that Al-Nashef had filed a kidnapping complaint but gave no details about the circumstances.
Al-Nashef said his wife left their home in Cairo's Mohandeseen neighborhood Friday afternoon to visit her parents nearly 3 km away, but she was abducted before she got there. At the time, he was giving a television interview about the situation in Syria in a studio in Cairo and was informed of the kidnapping through an anonymous text message he received on his mobile phone after he left the studio.
"We have your wife and we are going to sexually assault her so that you learn how not to insult your masters again," the text message said, according to Al-Nashef. It was from an Egyptian phone number.
After informing the media about the news and filing a police report, he received further messages threatening to kill his wife and throw her body in the Nile if he doesn't stop talking, Al-Nashef said, adding that he had been receiving other threats from Syrian agents for weeks.
Al-Nashef worked as a correspondent for Syria's state-agency SANA until 2006, when he became a regime opponent. He has lived in Egypt since 2007 and has been a vocal opponent of the regime, appearing often on Egyptian TV stations to discuss the uprising.
