Ziyad Ahmed Bakir, 37 years old, senior graphic designer at the Egyptian Opera House, husband, and father of three children, Habiba 11 years old, Adham 9 years old, and Ahmed 6 years old. His family and friends witnessed two things about him, good manners and creativity at work. As his family recounts, he had no political interest, as he saw life differently as his sister says: “Ziyad was speaking five languages, an intellectual, an artist at the highest level, who has his own world.”
His father tells that before the revolution events, Ziyad, his wife, and his three children came to the family home. His mother continued: “On January 25 he was sick with the flu, and his temperature was high. He wanted to go down to participate in the protests, but when I asked him not to go down, he listened to me. And when he came on January 28, he asked my permission again to let him go down, so I agreed.” She continued, “I followed him from the balcony, I saw him running, I wished that I would not allow him to go down, or I would reach him to ask him to return, but he did not return after that.”
His family followed what was happening on the streets through satellite channels, and January 28, Friday of Rage, was the bloodiest day among the days of the revolution. They waited for his return, but he did not. The next day, they went to all hospitals to search for him. They did not find him, but there was hope… The search continued and the trip was repeated in all hospitals, the morgue departments, and in the prisons… and the result was the same.
“People must see his artwork, to know that who he is that was killed by treachery and he was not an enemy,” his mother said while attending an exhibition of Ziyad’s works that was opened at the Hanager Art Center at the Egyptian Opera House.
His mother continued: “When I found his father wondering why he was late in the evening, I answered him without thinking, that he died. I do not know how it came out of my mouth. Unfortunately, the communications were cut off, and there was no way we can be assured of it.”
His sister says, that during the days of the revolution when the family started to search for him and resort to the media for trying to find him, strange phone calls without numbers came to the family that says Ziyad is fine and he is in a safe place but and the family must stop speaking to the media.
The hope for the Ziyad Ahmed Bakir’s family kept for a long time… a full of 42 days. The family rushed between hospitals and police stations and the morgue. The children of Ziyad do not stop asking their mother: “Mama … When daddy cames?… where is he, mama?..” Then, the question turned to the grandfather: “Do you know where daddy stays?” They were saying this to him while he was coming back exhausted from a daily search trip that had not stopped since the “Friday of Rage” January 28. On the 43rd day of his absence, a call came to the family, from the wife of the martyr Tariq Abd al-Latif al-Aqqash: “I am the wife of the martyr Tariq, and I found my husband in a Zeinhom Morgue under a different name, and I advise you to go to the morgue.” The family went to the morgue. They could not identify the body. After DNA analysis, it was proven that it was Ziad’s body. A big crowd, thousands of worshipers, gathered to participate in the funeral of Ziyad, inside the Omar Makram Mosque.
On his first anniversary, his father told one of the press in an interview: “I would be inconsistent with myself if I said that I didn’t wanted him to go down, because my son, like all children and youth of Egypt, is not more precious than any other one.”
The name of the martyr Ziyad Bakir was given to a school in Giza Governorate, and to one of the halls of the Egyptian Opera House in Cairo.