A popular Egyptian cartoonist on Sunday was arrested on charges of running a Web site without a license, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior said, in the latest escalation of a campaign to silence the government’s online critics.
The cartoonist, Islam Gawish, 26, who has 1.6 million Facebook followers, was arrested during a police raid on the offices of a news Web site based in Cairo.
Although his satirical cartoons have been published online, Gawish was not seen as an especially vehement critic of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi.
Photo: AP
It was the most prominent arrest since anniversary of the Jan. 25, 2011, uprising that ultimately toppled former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, which had been preceded by a wave of arrests and closures that focused on democracy activists and well-known cultural spaces in downtown Cairo.
Although al-Sisi’s government has silenced many critical voices in Egypt’s major news media, either by arresting journalists or forcing them into exile, it has struggled to contain free speech on the Internet, which is one of the few forums for open dissent at a time when public protest has been all but outlawed.
Facebook and other social media sites, which played a role in organizing the 2011 uprising, are popular with millions of Egyptians, but a handful of high-profile prosecutions have sent a warning to users about the limits of tolerance for political discussion.
In recent weeks, the authorities arrested five people who are accused of administering hundreds of Facebook pages that were sympathetic to the banned Muslim Brotherhood and that had sought to encourage public protest on Monday last week.
The circumstances of Gawish’s arrest, which follows the recent closing of the Townhouse Gallery arts space in central Cairo and a raid on the offices of a book publisher, seemed to signal that the government is seeking new ways to silence even moderate dissent.
The Sunday raid on the Egypt News Network, where Gawish worked, was carried out because the Web site was operating without an official permit, ministry spokesman Ayman Helmy said.
The ministry said Gawish was being charged with possessing pirated software and running an unauthorized personal Web site.
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