Journalist Ahmed al-Bahy Arrested By Egyptian Authorities
On Saturday, April 16, journalist Ahmed al-Bahy was detained by Egyptian state security forces, according to local news reports. Al-Bahy, a correspondent with independent news website Masrawy, was abducted from his home in the Nile Delta region. The following day, the Al-Sadat City prosecutor’s office charged al-Bahy with inciting violence and remanded him to detention for four days pending both investigation and trial.
Al-Bahy’s arrest came on the heels of his coverage of an incident in Sadat town the preceding day, where he was asked to “stop filming the murder of a young man." Al-Bahy complied with the request, but nonetheless was abducted from his home at 6 a.m. the next morning, according to Egyptian Journalists Syndicate’s Mahmoud Kamel. Al-Bahy covered social issues and human interest stories for Masrawry.
“It has become the norm that Egyptian authorities shut down journalistic investigations into political and human rights issues and imprison journalists covering them. However, shutting down an investigation into a seemingly non-political incident marks a clear attack against the journalism sector in Egypt as a whole,” said the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Egyptian authorities must immediately and unconditionally release journalist Ahmed al-Bahy, drop all charges against him, and ensure that journalists can cover issues of local interest freely and without fear of imprisonment.”
There are currently over 70 journalists imprisoned in Egypt. At least 25 of those people were imprisoned in retaliation for their work, according to CPJ. Authorities in Egypt regularly exploit loopholes in the law to retaliate against journalists. For example, Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid (also known as “Shawkan”) was released from prison in 2019 under “police observation.” This requires that he report to the police every evening, and thus far, the police have forced him to spend the night in the cells at the station every single night for the past three years. Shawkan is also barred from managing his property or managing his assets for the next five years.
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said: “Egypt being free of independent journalism has become really a matter of fact not a metaphor. The remainder of independent news websites in Egypt [have] just been blocked and [are] now fighting a war to survive, as a result of the government bodies’ antagonism towards press freedom while exerting no effort to carry out measures that further intensify the darkness and media desertification Egypt lives in.”
Egypt falls at 166 out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) World Press Freedom Index. Public consumption of journalism in Egypt is low, and recently, more and more independent outlets in the country have been closing due to low readership, raids, and arrests. The country has also been openly hostile to human rights advocates, throwing as many as 12 in jail on similar charges.
