Hollywood stars urge Truss to help free British-Egyptian writer on hunger strike

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Ms Seif said: “Today marks the 74th day of Alaa’s hunger strike, my brother is slowly dying in his prison cell but he wants to live. “He also made a little compromise from his side and switched to what he calls Gandhi-inspired hunger strike – he started taking 100 calories a day, basically to gain us more time in the campaign for his release.” Ms Seif noted the average daily calorie intake for a person is 2,000, adding: “We’re deeply puzzled by the way we’ve been treated by the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss. “Alaa is slowly dying and hopefully we can save him, I know we have a window of opportunity to save him.” Ms Seif said she believed Foreign Office minister Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon was “genuinely sympathetic” when they met but insisted the UK needs to make a high-level intervention. Raising concerns over the Foreign Office’s wider response to families, he said: “The approach seems haphazard, arbitrary, sometimes lacking resource, sometimes unco-ordinated and certainly lacking transparency and a sense of a systematic approach to these families that find themselves in this condition.” Richard Ratcliffe, whose wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained for six years in Iran, said the “sympathy but no traction” experienced by many relatives was a familiar story to him.