After Morsi won by a thin margin, a wave of anti-Brotherhood protests culminated in a military coup d’etat on July 3, 2013. That’s when Muslim Brotherhood supporters took to the streets. By August, tens of thousands of people were in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square.

Omar’s mother and sister insist he had nothing to do with the protests or the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been outlawed and labeled as a terrorist group since December 2013 (despite little evidence of any connection between the group and attacks on soldiers).

It’s difficult to know whether Omar was indeed simply helping or whether he was protesting and fighting back. The mother and sister oppose the regime and often watch pro-Muslim Brotherhood channels. They are conservative. In Badara’s flat, the call to prayer resonates loudly thanks to an amplifier, even though the nearby mosque is quite loud enough. On the walls of their small, homey living room hang a picture of Jerusalem and a quote from the Quran — common Egyptian household décor. On the middle of the Quran poster, there’s a sticker of a tiny, pink dancing doll.

Badara is caring and proud of her children, and her warmth extends to me. She refuses to let me take pictures until I eat the broth and vegetables, rice, cracked wheat and chicken she’s made for 5 p.m. lunch.

Maryam says she could never profess her political opinions openly at the university, for fear of arrest. She is pretty and bright, cares a lot about politics, and less probably about fact-checking.

Yet in family photos, Omar looks more like a rebellious soccer fan — handsome, clean-shaven and wearing sunglasses — than an Islamist. He played goalkeeper at Zamalek club, which hosts one of the two biggest Egyptian soccer teams, studied engineering at the prominent Islamic university Al-Azhar and composed rap songs with friends. His stage name was Omar Kano.

One song, called “Presidential Elections,” released amid the 2012 presidential elections, proclaims, “We want a president, not a new Ramses.” It demonstrates Omar’s intelligence and political awareness, liberally attacking all candidates, including Morsi. But a later one, “Revolution Maker,” in 2013, suggests at least some sympathy for the Brotherhood: “The regime’s dogs are playing a dirty game. The people distrust the Brotherhood, encouraging religious sectarianism and political divisions. They want Islam without Muslims, all of them conspirators in the hands of the Americans.”

“He loved his country,” Maryam says, “didn’t care much for any political affiliation, didn’t make a big deal about the religion. He had many Christian friends, and he would go to their church for their celebrations.”

The military would claim that the Brotherhood protesters were armed and fought back. Journalists saw some civilians with guns, but no more than a few. Most of the dead were shot in the head or the chest. One man was burned alive in his tent.

“Omar is a very sociable person,” Badara says. “He is very sweet and kind and has very good morals.” His sister, a law student, says he was studying to be “a construction engineer to build his country.”

On the morning of his disappearance, Omar and Maryam arrived at the university gates and encountered his musician friends, who said people were injured and needed help.

“I didn’t think it was that terrible,” Maryam said. “I thought they’d be done quickly, so I didn’t come with them. I told him to be careful and stay away from the bullets.”

What happened that morning remains a divisive memory in recent Egyptian history. One side of the political spectrum cites it as proof of the government’s savagery. The other side says the protesters got what they deserved. Multiple reports suggest the Islamists simply refused to negotiate, setting the stage for a bloodbath.

Just after dawn, security forces moved in to disperse the camp. Each side says the other fired first. Before long, medics were overwhelmed. According to a report in The Guardian, a flustered doctor told the friends of a wounded man, “This one isn’t such a big deal. Just try to squeeze his organs back in.” Soldiers pushed in from all sides as sniper fire rained down from above. Exiting the square was as treacherous as sheltering in it. The Muslim Brotherhood and the government both have video evidence of the opposing side firing live ammunition. Protesters killed eight soldiers, however; soldiers killed about 1,000 protesters, rights groups say.

The last time Maryam heard her brother’s voice was on the phone at 11 a.m. She told him she wanted him to come back near the university. He told her he needed to help more injured people to the field hospital. The connection was bad, and she couldn’t hear him very well.

Two hours later, their sister got through to him. “He told her not to worry, that he was coming back soon,” Maryam says. After that, his phone was off.

With no sign of Omar, Maryam set off toward the field hospital in the square. She describes a landscape of blood and chaos.* “I had to look at all the injured, and all the dead bodies, to make sure I didn’t find Omar among them.” When she got to the field hospital, she hunkered down amid a growing number of corpses and fled with a group when the tear gas became too strong.

“We didn’t know how to get out of there alive,” she says. They ducked into a building and ran up to a higher floor. But the building, too, came under siege. They grew fearful the building would catch fire (it never did), and they rushed outside. The first ones out were arrested, but Maryam made it.

She called her parents, and her father drove to Rabaa Square and took her home, where she slumped into despair. “I was so depressed after that,” Maryam says.

“The first day after Omar went missing, we thought he’d come back any time,” Badara says. “The second day as well. Then it was three days, then a week, then a month, and today…”

The first places they checked were the morgues and hospitals. They didn’t find him, and they didn’t find any of his belongings among the effects of unidentified bodies.

At Rabaa, bodies were torched to mounds of cinder. The government has used DNA testing on these remains, but Badara has not found Omar’s DNA on file at any morgue.

There was, however, some indication that he was arrested and not killed in the massacre. “The friends who were with him that day during the sit-in dispersal told us they had seen him being taken by the security forces into their truck,” Badara says. “They said his shoulder looked injured.” (Badara declined to put me in touch with Omar’s friends, saying they were afraid and at greater risk because they are men.)

Badara says she has been to the Ministry of Interior so many times she cannot keep count. “It became my second home,” she says. The Interior Ministry is responsible for telling families whether their relatives are detained. But officially, the ministry has no record of Omar. Every time she visited, the officers sent her away. Discreetly, however, an employee told her otherwise, that his name was in the records. But the employee would not or could not say in which prison he was being held. It’s difficult to know who is reliable and who is trying to take advantage of their desperation.

Omar’s father has visited several civilian prisons, but the authorities refused to allow him to check the registers or simply said, “He’s not here.”

“Once, I explained to a neighbor how my son disappeared,” Badara says. “I said he was caught during the Rabaa sit-in dispersal, and they didn’t want to talk to me anymore. They thought I was a sympathizer of the Brotherhood and that was enough. Why is it foreigners empathize more than our fellow countrymen with us?”

If Badara wasn’t a Brotherhood supporter before the Rabaa massacre, it is obvious where her sympathies lie now, from her Islamic piety to her unconcealed opposition to the regime. She has appeared on Brotherhood television talk shows and has reached out to the mothers of other missing sons on Facebook, emboldened by the belief the military is unlikely to harm a woman. In one TV appearance, she told the interviewer, “We have hope, we have a lot of patience, we won’t stay quiet nor give up on our children.” Badara believes the army’s coup soon will be reversed by a new revolutionary wave.

This is a dangerous attitude in Egypt. The military is waging a war against elusive terrorist groups who have killed hundreds of troops in the desert Sinai Peninsula. The conflict has disrupted civilian life through curfews, raids on villages suspected of harboring terrorists and apparently random arrests. The army is evicting families and laying waste to towns near Gaza as a buffer with Palestine.

In this Egypt, it’s easy to be branded as a terrorist. Even breaking curfew is punishable by 15 years in prison. One NGO estimates as many as 40,000 people have been arrested for political reasons since the 2013 coup.

In July 2014, Badara was sitting in the waiting room of the West Cairo prosecutor’s office when she heard two lawyers talking about a military prison called Azouli. They were saying the facility was holding a number of people who were believed to have disappeared.

A month earlier, an Egyptian human rights activist wrote a blog post for Amnesty International about a prison where political detainees were “being subjected to levels of torture I did not imagine.” While searching for information,“people were too scared to even utter its name,” he wrote. The opposition lawyer Ahmed Helmy has described Azouli as “the Egyptian Guantanamo.”

Badara became convinced Omar was in Azouli, and she decided she needed to get inside. If anyone had seen him alive, this was her best hope of knowing.

Human rights groups say half of Azouli is a normal military prison, for suspected terrorists and prisoners of war. The other half, on the third floor of the building, is for secret prisoners. When civilians disappear, this is where they go.

“It would be difficult to say whether the Azouli inmates are all actually terrorists,” says Mohamed Khedr, a leftist Egyptian lawyer who has clients who were detained there. He and other lawyers estimate some 300 prisoners are held on the third floor at any given time, most of them from Sinai. Lawyers say special forces arrest “suspects” and torture them until they sign confessions. Then they wait until their wounds heal and transfer them to prosecutors. “It is very common to find a detainee accused of an attack that took place after the prisoner was detained,” Khedr says.