A prominent Egyptian journalist who reported on a young man’s death in police custody has been detained on charges of reporting “fake news,” his employer said on Friday, the latest blow to press freedoms in the country.
The arrest of Islam el-Kalhy comes after the arrest of several other local reporters in the past few weeks, despite fears of the spread of COVID-19 in Egyptian prisons.
The government of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has squeezed space for traditional media outlets and stamped out nearly all dissent as part of a wide-ranging crackdown.
The content of state-owned media is tightly controlled, while most privately owned news media in the country has been acquired by Egyptian intelligence services or supporters of al-Sisi.
The Egyptian Ministry of the Interior did not respond to requests for comment. Egyptian authorities in the past have denied rights breaches and justified arrests on grounds of national security.
El-Kalhy was picked up by police “while he was doing his work,” said his employer, Darb, a news Web site owned by a socialist opposition party in Egypt.
He was forcibly disappeared for 24 hours before surfacing on Thursday at the public prosecutor’s office, where he was ordered detained for 15 days on charges of broadcasting “fake news.”
He had been reporting on the “repercussions” of a young man’s death in detention, the outlet said, a contested case that touched off a rare burst of street protests earlier this week.
The family of the 26-year-old detainee accuses the police of killing him, which the ministry denies. It said that the man who died had been wounded in clashes stemming from a financial dispute in Cairo’s Moneib district.
The spontaneous street protests outside the police station were swiftly dispersed, but more broadly evoked the outrage over police brutality that helped spark the 2011 uprising that toppled Egypt’s longtime autocrat, former president Hosni Mubarak.
Demonstrations have been banned since 2013, when al-Sisi led the military’s overthrow of former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, a democratically elected, but divisive Islamist leader, amid mass protests against his rule.
Darb editor-in-chief Khaled el-Balshy, who is also a former syndicate board member, vigorously denounced the arrest of el-Kalhy.
“It’s a miserable situation to the point where doing journalistic work is more like committing a crime,” he said.
Government censors have blocked Darb, as well as his two previous publications, from easy Internet access within the country, he said.
“The long line of imprisoned Egyptian journalists does not end,” el-Balshy said. “Every day another is added, the latest of which is my dear colleague.”
Egypt is ranked among the world’s worst jailers of journalists, along with Turkey and China, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists, a US-based watchdog.
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