Fatima Kaleesh (L), and her daughter, Fatima Bibi, from Giza, Egypt. He has been in custody in the court for nearly two months. Credit: Reuters

The three-month-old boy’s father – identified as Fatima Kaleesh by his sister’s family – has been in custody since June, accused of smuggling the child into Egypt from Syria on a rickety boat in the eastern Mediterranean under false promises that he would be a “model citizen”.

The girl was born in Egypt, where her paternal grandfather, Fadil al-Khalil, a fisherman and a well-known advocate for refugees, runs a refugee camp in the Suez Canal town of Tamanrasset.

She had visited family members in Egypt since the age of two and had already graduated from a university in the United Arab Emirates. She is thought to be among an estimated 40 women in the region with Syrian ties, according to the Arab News Agency (ANI).

But instead of a happy family life, Kaleesh was left to die alone in Suez, after her mother’s attempts to rescue the baby failed and they were forced to sink the boat.

Faced with the prospect of arrest, Kaleesh was seen as a potential scapegoat by activists, the New York Times reported. They demanded the father get his daughter back, but his story did not match the official version.

A man from the local Syrian community, Ibrahim al-Zahrani, was charged with smuggling children into the country, and accused of telling the story of the migrant child who drowned. After failing to find a translator (according to Reuters), a judge released the accused in July 2015 and put Kaleesh on house arrest. But she continued to push her case with the help of a local lawyer, and last year, that lawyer persuaded the court to grant her bail.

A month later, according to Reuters, Kaleesh was back in court, accused of smuggling the girl from the United Arab Emirates on a rickety boat into Egypt, also after failing to find a translator.

“We are trying to get this man freed from jail,” Ibrahim al-Zahrani’s wife Aliya told Reuters.

She claims a member of her family, Fatima Bibi, was with the baby in the boat when it capsized off Suez last May. She was rescued