The Egyptian government arrested a journalist after he traveled to the southern city of Luxor to monitor the alleged murder of a man in a police raid last week, according to his employer and family.
The al-Manassa online news page reported that Basma Mostafa had arrived in Luxor on Saturday morning but lost contact with her. Al-Manassa said in a report that Mostafa believed she was being monitored by police while in town.
Human rights lawyer Karim Abdel-Rady, who is also her husband, said his wife gave the impression Sunday in the workplace of the Egyptian state security prosecutor in the capital Cairo. Another lawyer, Khaled Ali, showed that the 30-year-old journalist had brought in the prosecutors.
Later on Sunday, al-Manassa reported that prosecutors had questioned Mostafa and ordered him to remain in custody for 14 days, and said his lawyers did know the fees he faced because they were allowed to attend the investigation.
Al-Manassa wrote on his online page that Mostafa’s last phone call on Saturday at 11:15 am local time, in which he stated that “a policeman had arrested her in the city of Luxor and had verified her ID card before letting her go. But he continued, to stick to it. “
There were no immediate comments from the authorities. In the past, the government arrested bloodhounds who say they operate without mandatory authorizations. The medium for which Mostafa works is prohibited from operating in Egypt and its online page is blocked.
According to independent Egyptian news Mada Masr, al-Manassa and at least another 500 seconds have been blocked in Egypt since 2017.
The media must have licenses to paint in Egypt, but denial of accreditation is used as a pretext to silence reports that the state considers critical. Some hounds have also been convicted of “spreading fake news,” a punishable crime.
Mostafa had recently reported the death of a young man while in police custody in Cairo in September, she in Luxor to control the riots in the village of el-Awamiya after the death of a guy who reportedly at the hands of police last week. , according to the human rights organization Amnesty International.
The government, led by President-in-Office Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, oversaw an unprecedented crackdown on dissent and the media, silencing critics and imprisoning thousands of people.
In recent years, Egypt has imprisoned dozens of hounds and expelled some foreign hounds, and remains one of the world’s worst hound incarcerated, along with Turkey and China, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In June, the government raided Al-Manassa’s Cairo offices and briefly arrested its editor-in-chief, Nora Younis, who was released pending an investigation into fees for administering an uns licensed news website.
Mahmoud Hussein of Al Jazeera has also been detained at an Egyptian criminal rate for more than 3 years.
Al Jazeera has called on the Egyptian government to release Hussein and other journalists, raising profound considerations about his fitness amid the coronavirus outbreak, but calls have received no response.
In a report published in May, Amnesty said journalism had been a crime in Egypt for the past four years, as the government took strong action against the media and gagged dissent.
The global rights control body said it has documented 37 cases of hounds arrested in the government’s growing crackdown on press freedom, many of whom are accused of “spreading fake news” or “abusing the media. “social media “under a comprehensive anti-terrorism law of 2015 that expanded the definition of terror to include all kinds of dissent.
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