CAIRO — Four journalists from one of Egypt’s last independent news outlets were charged with criminal offenses on Wednesday, in the government’s latest attempt to intimidate and punish the publication for its reporting.
The charges — publishing fake news, misusing social media and insulting members of Parliament — stemmed from an article that the outlet, Mada Masr, published last week on a corruption inquiry and impending leadership shake-up in the political party that dominates Parliament, the Nation’s Future Party. The party is closely associated with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Under Mr. el-Sisi, who came to power after a military takeover in 2013, Egypt has stamped out even minor forms of dissent and has muzzled the news media, jailing dozens of journalists, using the security services to buy up outlets and blocking uncooperative news sites.
The sites blocked in Egypt include Mada Masr, an online outlet that is published in English and Arabic and that continued to offer hard-hitting reporting on Egypt when most of the rest of the country’s news media fell prey to government repression.
After the article was published last week, the Nation’s Future Party filed a series of legal complaints against several Mada Masr journalists, including the four charged on Wednesday: Rana Mamdouh, Beesan Kassab, Sara Seif Eddin and Lina Attalah. The complaints accused the journalists of “insult, slander and defamation,” according to Mada Masr, and asserted that the news outlet had broken Egyptian media laws.
They were summoned to the public prosecutor’s office on Wednesday, where each faced four prosecutors and underwent hours of questioning about the article before being released on bail, one of their lawyers, Ragia Omran, said.
Though Mada Masr said in a statement that none of the four had worked on the article in question, Ms. Mamdouh, Ms. Ramadan and Ms. Seif Eddin were credited with writing a daily news bulletin last week that included the article. Ms. Attalah, Mada Masr’s founder and editor, faced an additional charge of establishing a news website without a license, according to Mada Masr.
It is not clear whether prosecutors will pursue the case and bring it to trial.
The article, citing four anonymous sources from within the leadership of the Nation’s Future Party, described a government-led “purge” of top officials who had been implicated in corruption and other abuses.
“Mada Masr affirms the integrity of its reporting and its commitment to professional journalistic standards,” the publication said in reporting the original complaint last Thursday. “It considers the publication of news in relation to the party which holds a majority in Parliament and possesses close ties to the government to be in the public interest.”
The site added that, rather than denying the claims in the article, the party had instead resorted to “the threat of security measures against journalists doing their work in some of the hardest conditions possible,” including constant harassment by security officials and the possibility of imprisonment.
Political and labor activists, rights advocates, rights lawyers and others seen by the government as opponents also face heavy scrutiny and, often, imprisonment. Egypt holds thousands of such detainees.
Since its founding, in 2013, Mada Masr has been a prominent target. The authorities raided its offices and arrested four reporters and editors in November 2019, ultimately releasing them amid international pressure. Ms. Attalah was also arrested in May 2020 while reporting outside a prison. She was released the same day.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
