The six journalists of the “Matsda2sh” platform entered Saturday, October 3, their fifth day of disappearance without a lawyer having reached any of them, and without the Supreme State Security Prosecution announcing a single charge or case number. In contrast, newspapers and television channels aligned with the state had been circulating, since the Ministry of Interior issued its statement on the morning of Thursday, October 1, a single narrative with uniform vocabulary describing the six as a “media committee” belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood run by “a fugitive Brotherhood member abroad,” before writer Abd El-Rahim Ali broadcast on “MBC Masr” audio recordings whose source he did not disclose, and “Al-Masry Al-Youm” website published a report dated Thursday about their detention for fifteen days, a report denied by their lawyers and the Journalists Syndicate.
The campaign began on the evening of Monday, September 28, when a security force raided the home of journalist Abdullah Qadri, then that of his colleague Mohamed Ashraf Abu Umaira, according to documentation by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, whose lawyers handle the defense of the entire team. During the day of Tuesday, September 29, Islam Barakat was arrested from his home in Gharbia, Omar Hilal from his home in Port Said, then Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel from a Cairo street, the last two team members still outside detention, according to Reporters Without Borders, which described what happened as unprecedented in Egypt: an entire newsroom behind bars. The Egyptian Initiative said the forces that raided the homes presented no arrest or search warrant and did not tell families where their relatives were being taken, while confiscating phones and computers, including devices belonging to family members. Abd El-Rahman Mansour, one of the platform’s co-founders, told the Associated Press that the force that took Abu Umaira broke apart his bookshelf and home internet device.
On Tuesday night the Freedoms Committee issued a statement declaring full solidarity with Qadri and Abu Umaira, describing their arrest and the search of one of their homes as a violation of the law and the Constitution, with Committee head Iman Awf saying that adding new journalists to the list of detainees means continuing the same pattern of targeting journalists and preventing the press from performing its role. On Wednesday, September 30, the Syndicate submitted a complaint to the Minister of Interior and a report to Prosecutor General Counselor Mohamed Shawqi, demanding disclosure of the six journalists’ detention locations, the circumstances of their arrest, and their release. On the same day Syndicate Chairman Khaled Al-Balshy sent a letter to the prosecution requesting notification of any investigation hearing so Syndicate representatives could attend. That same day, more than fifty organizations and independent media outlets, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, and Article 19, signed a global call for the immediate release of the team, with signatories later rising to more than eighty, with the Committee to Protect Journalists noting that nineteen other journalists were behind bars in Egypt at the moment the call was issued.
No official body acknowledged the colleagues’ detention for approximately sixty hours. Then the Ministry of Interior published its statement on the morning of Thursday, October 1, on its Facebook and X pages, saying it had monitored an internet page called “Matsda2sh” that it described as “unlicensed and run from abroad,” broadcasting false news and distorting facts, and that examination revealed it to be “among the media committees of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organization, run from abroad by the fugitive Brotherhood member” Abd El-Rahman Shukri Ali Abd El-Galil Mansour, with his full four-part name as written in police reports, and that Brotherhood elements inside the country prepare fabricated news and send it to him for publication in exchange for financial funding from abroad. The statement added that it had been possible to “formalize procedures” and apprehend six members of this committee, one registered with the Journalists Syndicate and the others not, and that the Ministry had informed the Syndicate Chairman at the time of the arrest of the registered journalist and the background to his arrest. The statement contained no specific charge under the Penal Code or the anti-terrorism law, no case number, no location of detention, and no identification of the body investigating the six. These four gaps are the precise points on which Human Rights Watch built its statement the following day, considering that holding journalists in isolation while denying their whereabouts may amount to enforced disappearance under international law, with the organization’s Deputy Middle East Director Bassam Khawaja saying that dismantling an entire newsroom within hours, without prior warning or justification, sends a terrifying message to every journalist working in Egypt.
Matsda2sh responded the same day with a five-point statement under the heading “We Are Not Brotherhood, Certified by the Security Services Themselves,” rebutting what it called “five misleading claims” in the ministry’s statement. In the first point it said the platform had published hundreds of corrections over eight years to statements and news promoted by parties and figures aligned with the Brotherhood, and refuted hundreds of rumors broadcast by media operating outside Egypt, with the most recent of these corrections issued one day before the team’s arrest, on September 27, when it corrected false information that had circulated about Presidential Decision No. 395 of 2026 delegating Defense and Military Production Minister General Ashraf Salem in some presidential competencies under the General Mobilization Law.
In the second point it said all team members are Egyptians residing inside Egypt, and that the transparency data on its Facebook and X accounts shows it is operated from inside the country. In the third it said Mansour had left Egypt legally years ago, that no case is pending against him and no ruling has been issued against him, and that he obtained an electronic criminal record from the Interior Ministry itself a few years ago that contained no convictions against him. In the fourth it said three of the six journalists had undergone a background check and investigation approximately three years earlier, following the arrest of a former colleague, and the platform was subsequently informed that no connection had been established between them and any political group or funding. In the fifth it said the journalists receive normal salaries with employment contracts and official income documentation, paid through the Egyptian banking system, at wage levels standard in independent institutions.
The investigation the fourth point refers to dates to August 2023, when a security force raided at dawn the home of platform editor Karim Asaad in Al-Shorouk City, and assaulted him and his wife and threatened them with their son, then accessed “Matsda2sh” accounts and deleted two posts about the identities of Egyptian passengers on a plane intercepted in Zambia carrying cash, gold, and weapons. Mansour told the Associated Press that national security investigators at the time released two editors after thirty-six hours without filing any charges, having found no Brotherhood connection. After that incident, the platform offered the security bodies to formalize its status officially as a journalistic platform and establish premises bringing its team together inside Egypt, an offer that was met with silence. This is precisely what makes the description “unlicensed page” in the ministry’s statement problematic: the body holding the platform accountable for the absence of a license is the same body that did not respond when one was requested. When the services used this argument to deflect the Syndicate’s mediation, on the grounds that “Matsda2sh” is a social media page that never applied for a license from the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, Al-Balshy replied, according to what he told Mada Masr: “But I told you: don’t deal with it, not arrest it.”
The platform holds a public record predating the campaign by eight years. It was founded in 2018 as a fact-checking platform and later expanded into open-source investigations in Egypt and other Arab countries. Its website is blocked inside Egypt while its Facebook page is followed by more than one million people, according to the Associated Press. An academic study published in 2021 on political fact-checking in the Middle East included it among six leading Arab platforms alongside “Misbar,” “Fatabyyano,” and “Sahih Masr,” and found it ranked second among the six in the frequency of fact-checking statements by Arab presidents and rulers. None of this record supports or refutes a criminal charge, but it establishes what the state knew about the platform before describing it as a secret committee.
Leaked Calls
No sooner had the ministry’s statement been issued than narratives formed around it within hours bearing all the hallmarks of a single source. On the afternoon and evening of Thursday, the “Al-Gomhuria Online” portal published material attributing to unnamed “sources” that Mansour was an “organizational cadre” who founded four Brotherhood websites and pages, namely “Ikhwan Online,” “Islam Online,” “We Are All Khaled Said,” and then “Matsda2sh,” that he had left for the United States in 2013 following the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in, that his father had been a Brotherhood cadre in Daqahlia who was arrested in 2008 after returning from the Gulf, that he had established a company in New York named “Open Transformation Lab,” and that he ran the platform from abroad “via six journalists through bank transfers” directing them with “assignments on specific files against the state.” During the same hours the same sentences appeared, in the same order and wording, in the state-owned Al-Akhbar Al-Youm, which described what had happened as “a new slap to the fugitive Brotherhood member,” and in “Egypt Telegraph,” “Akhbar Press,” “Sada Al-Balad,” and dozens of smaller sites, including a notable sentence saying that the Syndicate Chairman “was informed that the case is of a Brotherhood nature.” The state-owned Middle East News Agency and “Al-Ahram” newspaper published photos of Mansour with a reference to his father being “a Brotherhood cadre who had previously been arrested.”
These uniformly produced media accusations added to the charge what the Ministry of Interior cannot write in a statement that would be cited before a court: the father’s biography, the date of departure, the company name, the transfer mechanism, all attributed to “sources.” A source at the Journalists Syndicate says those accusations transfer the burden of proof from the authority holding six people without charge to the people themselves and their families, so Mansour must prove his father is not a cadre, and the journalists must prove they received no transfers beyond their salaries, while none of them has been asked a single question in an investigation.
What is publicly documented about Mansour is narrower than this biography and further from it. Mansour, according to a profile published by the “Mobtada” website itself in 2015, participated in his first demonstration in 2003 against the invasion of Iraq, joined the Kifaya movement in 2005 as a student at Mansoura University where he co-published a satirical political magazine called “Children of the Country,” blogged since 2005 on the “Correspondent of Earth” blog, was arrested in 2008 and released by Aja Center investigations at the age of twenty-one, then shared with Wael Ghoneim the management of the “We Are All Khaled Said” page since 2010 and proposed the date of January 25, and was drafted for military service on January 17, 2011, with his friends concealing his name before Ghoneim revealed it. It is notable that the only documented 2008 incident in this biography concerns Mansour himself, not his father, while the “sources” material attributes an arrest in the same year to the father after returning from the Gulf, and Zawia3 was unable to verify either account.
As for the current attribution of Brotherhood membership to him, its only circulating source is a statement by the late Brotherhood leader Essam Al-Erian on “OTV” on September 2, 2012, in which he said Mansour was a member of the organization and that Ghoneim “was affiliated with the Brotherhood for a period.” Mansour replied the same day, in statements republished by “Al-Muwatin” website, that he had separated from the organization a year before the revolution, that his political activity during his time within it was outside its agenda and events, and that any attempt to rewrite the revolution’s history and attribute it to a specific organization does not reflect what happened, because the revolution began with Egyptians’ struggle, not with an organization’s decision. Ghoneim also denied any organizational affiliation. The complete incident, as it unfolded in 2012, was an attempt by a Brotherhood leader while his organization was in power to claim the revolution and its most famous page as belonging to his organization, answered by two of the page’s founders with a denial. The Al-Ahram Gate, Cairo 24, Sada Al-Balad and others republished Al-Erian’s clip in recent hours under the hashtag “Glory to the Archive” as a “confession” that settles the matter, deleting from the archive its second half, which is the same-day rebuttal, and using reasoning that assumes a Brotherhood leader’s testimony against his opponents suffices to criminalize them, while the official statement does not even have this testimony. The rush led the official Al-Ahram portal to write in the same piece that the services had apprehended six people running the page “including Abd El-Rahman Mansour, registered with the Journalists Syndicate,” placing the man the Interior Ministry’s statement describes as a fugitive abroad among those arrested inside the country, an error uncorrected as of this report’s preparation.
Al-Ahram Gate, October 2, 2026: the piece places Abd El-Rahman Mansour among the six arrested and “registered with the Journalists Syndicate,” while the Interior Ministry’s statement describes him as “a fugitive abroad.” The page remained uncorrected as of October 3.
Then came the turn of the television screens. On the evening of Friday, October 2, in the “Al-Hikaya” program on “MBC Masr,” Amr Adeeb hosted in a phone call writer Abd El-Rahim Ali, who broadcast on air audio recordings whose source and method of acquisition he did not disclose, claiming they were of Mansour and proved his connection to the Brotherhood. Ali broadcast three recordings: the first he said dated to March 2011 between Mansour and then-Deputy Supreme Guide Khairat Al-Shater, in which Al-Shater wishes Mansour success and praises what he says the latter had restored of dignity to the organization; the second between Mansour and journalist Marwa Awad, former Reuters correspondent, about her helping him transition to New York and establish his company; and the third between Mansour and someone he described as a member of the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth about requesting a meeting with the French ambassador. Ali said he possessed approximately five hundred calls relating to Mansour, that Brotherhood leadership had considered him among elements of its “soft power” and a symbol of its media, and that he had established twenty-four platforms in ten countries.
The oldest call, if authentic, was recorded in March 2011, seven years before “Matsda2sh” was founded, in a month when the Brotherhood was a legitimate party to the political scene whose leaders met with all revolutionary forces including the managers of its most famous page, and when no law in Egypt criminalized a phone call with it. As for the relocation-to-New-York call, it is at worst evidence that a man who left his country sought help from a colleague in his destination country, which is what the platform itself says about his legal departure. The most important phrase in the interview is not in the recordings but in their number: whoever possesses five hundred calls of a single citizen spanning fifteen years of recording may be a recipient of the product of systematic surveillance that only a sovereign body can conduct, the same body whose ministry denied in 2014 any connection with what the same man had broadcast. Ali said “Matsda2sh” belongs to an American non-profit company headquartered in New York called “Open Transformation Lab,” founded in 2017, that received tax-exempt status in 2018, that also owns the “Arabi Facts Hub” platform, and has twenty-four websites in ten Arab countries. When Adeeb asked why the platform had become a problem now after eight years of operation, he answered that it causes harm to the country’s reputation, describing anyone who does not stand against it as committing high treason.
In Ali’s account, the platform is a party in a network run by Mansour from the United States, branching into ten Arab countries, its actual work intelligence not journalistic, the evidence being that it tracks aircraft and ships. This description deserves examination, because each part of it points to something publicly available.
The network he spoke of is called the “Arabi Facts Hub,” which, according to its about page, is a non-profit research organization studying Arabic-language misinformation online, building an open database of fact-checks from Arab platforms, and developing artificial intelligence tools to detect false news. As for the “twenty-four websites in ten countries” that Ali presented as a revelation, they are the partner list published on the Hub’s website with names, logos, and material counts: “Matsda2sh” and “Sahih Masr” from Egypt, “Beam Reports” and “Thaqqaf” from Sudan, “Sahih Iraq” and “The Checker” from Iraq, four Libyan platforms, five Yemeni, three Palestinian including “Thaqqaf” a member of the Arab Fact-Checkers Network affiliated with ARIJ, three Syrian, and platforms from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, totaling twenty-four partners in ten countries exactly as he said, with more than 42,000 aggregated fact-check pieces. This organization does not operate in the shadows: in June it ran workshops for Iraqi journalists on verifying climate claims organized by UNDP and supported by the European Union, signed a cooperation protocol with the Libyan Institute for Investigative Journalism, shared coverage of an “AI Day” event in Egypt on its Facebook page, and publishes its research reports with authors’ names, including work that Zawia3 has published. What Ali called a secret network is indeed a network, but it is a fact-checkers network written on a page titled “Our Partners.”
The parent company whose tax registration number Ali presented as a document from a “black box” is itself a publicly registered entity with the US Internal Revenue Service under number 82-3402717, and its public file on Charity Navigator carries a four-star rating out of four, with its annual filings available to all showing it was established in 2018 with a tax exemption issued in May of the same year, and its declared mission is to provide reliable content countering misinformation and propaganda about Middle East events and to refute rumors fueling hate speech against vulnerable groups in Egypt and Arab communities.
As for the charge to which Ali devoted the longest explanation, that tracking aircraft and ships is intelligence work, he built it on two layers. The first is the mechanism: he said the platform and similar “supported networks” rely on open-source tools and specialized software to monitor air and maritime traffic, from flight-tracking websites to ship radars. The second is the purpose: he said this tracking is not conducted for journalistic fact-checking but to monitor and map the movement of sovereign aircraft, diplomats, Egyptian state shipping movements and vessels, and to craft targeted narratives embarrassing state institutions or disclosing information about movements and regional understandings under the guise of fact-checking. The first layer is entirely accurate, and the platform itself says so before he does: it writes on its methodology page, published since 2018, that it returns to primary sources and uses reverse image search, and may use open-source tools including geolocation and flight tracking when a subject requires it. The second layer is the one that collapses under examination.
What do these tools actually capture? They capture signals that aircraft and ships transmit about themselves as required by international law, not against their will. An aircraft appearing on “FlightRadar24” appears because its automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) device transmits its identity, position, altitude, and speed to every receiver within range, a transmission required by civil aviation rules in most of the world’s airspace to prevent collisions, and captured by a network of more than twenty thousand receivers owned by hobbyists and companies. A ship appearing on “Marine Traffic” appears because the Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmits its name, flag, position, course, and destination, a system that Regulation 19 of Chapter Five of the SOLAS convention (Safety of Life at Sea) requires all ships over three hundred tons on international voyages, and all passenger ships, to operate at all times, explicitly exempting warships and allowing the flag state to exempt specific vessels. The state that wants to conceal a warship or sovereign aircraft has the legal means to do so and does not need to stop journalists: military aircraft do not broadcast on civilian frequencies, major tracking sites honor blocking lists requested by governments and aircraft operators that remove aircraft from maps, and a government vessel is listed among what the flag state exempts. What appears on these sites from state traffic is, by definition, what the state chose not to hide. This is precisely where the “disclosure” characterization collapses: Article 85 of the Penal Code defines defense secrets as information whose concealment from those without authorization is required by the interest of national defense, and information that an aircraft broadcasts to every person with a phone is a secret from no one, nor can a journalist disclose what an aircraft announces about itself. These sites do not show aircraft passengers or ship travelers, so talk of “mapping diplomats’ movements” assumes a tool that does not exist.
Who uses these tools anyway? The Al Jazeera open-source unit tracked days ago, using “Marine Traffic” and “Kpler,” eight Iranian tankers intercepted by US forces, and the Financial Times reported that “Marine Traffic” users jumped to 8.5 million in April with the Iran war because governments, companies, and media monitor energy flows in the Strait of Hormuz with it. In Egypt itself, the “Al-Qahera News” channel owned by the United Company published a report headlined “FlightRadar” tracking the departure of Netanyahu’s plane from Nevatim base to an unknown destination, meaning it tracked the sovereign aircraft of another state’s prime minister at a security-sensitive moment, which is exactly what Ali describes as espionage when “Matsda2sh” does it. “Al-Watan” newspaper explained to its readers how the site works when it tracked the disappearance of Bashar Al-Assad’s plane, and “Al-Akhbar Al-Youm” has an entire hashtag in the tool’s name. The Egyptian Ministry of Transport itself, when it wanted last August to deny Egypt’s connection to the vessel “Tahama” targeted by the Houthis, relied on the flag, owner, and operator data published by the same maritime databases, and said it monitors maritime traffic in the Red Sea and Mediterranean, meaning the state reads the same maps it criminalizes others for reading.
What did “Matsda2sh” actually track? Three documented examples suffice. The first is the Zambia plane in August 2023: the private Gulfstream jet intercepted by Zambia’s Drug Enforcement Commission with approximately six million dollars, gold bars, and weapons on board was announced by the official Middle East News Agency, citing an informed source, to be a private plane that stopped in transit at Cairo airport and was inspected; the state itself denied the plane was sovereign, and its route from Amman to Cairo to Lusaka was on “FlightRadar24” for anyone who searched for it. What the platform added was what was not on display: the identities of the Egyptian passengers from their passports and their lawyers’ correspondence, including a Ministry of Interior officer and a former major who had served as assistant military attaché in Washington, information that no official body publicly denied, with the services responding instead by raiding Karim Asaad’s home and deleting two posts. The second is the “Floating Tank” investigation published by the platform last summer in partnership with “Raseef22,” tracking the course of the “YEMEN” tanker operating as a floating storage unit off Ras Isa and the network of companies and businesspeople fueling it for the Houthi group, the same group whose attacks on shipping had cost the Suez Canal a portion of its revenues. Weeks later a Yemeni maritime security unit published a report on the same floating tank using the same methodology, circulated by the Saudi newspaper “Okaz” and Gulf websites as a disclosure of a Houthi plot; the work considered a useful security disclosure in Riyadh is considered hostile intelligence work in Cairo, the only difference being the identity of who produced it. The third is the two vessels damaged at Damietta last July, one of them an American regasification ship the government had chartered for energy supply: the incident was reported by world agencies, the Houthis publicly denied responsibility, Cairo issued an official statement urging foreign media to exercise accuracy in covering it, and the head of maritime services spoke to Al-Ahram Gate about the secrets of successfully managing the regasification vessel fire. Everything the platform wrote was about an incident announced by the state and discussed in its national press, adding what journalism is supposed to add: who is the vessel, who chartered it, and why.
The rest of the platform’s investigation list on its website completes the picture from within: satellite imagery monitoring the expansion of construction works on Yemen’s Mayun Island overlooking the Bab al-Mandab, an investigation into an extreme right-wing Israeli organization encroaching on the Lebanese border, an exclusive that the Court of Cassation’s prosecution recommended upholding the state’s recovery of 29 land plots in Saint Catherine’s Monastery, alongside analysis of electricity sector loans and the financial performance deterioration of “Al-Wataniyya for Media.” The platform accused of serving the Brotherhood publishes about Houthis, settlers, and Red Sea bases what any national newspaper would be pleased to have, and the platform accused of distorting facts spent its last day before the raid correcting a rumor about a presidential decree. One thing remains from Ali’s accusations that the facts do not refute: the platform may publish something that embarrasses one of the state’s institutions. And this, in any definition of journalism including that of the Egyptian Constitution which prohibits in Article 71 imprisonment in publishing crimes except for incitement to violence, discrimination, or defamation, is called journalism, not espionage.
The question of the recordings remains. Article 57 of the Constitution guarantees the privacy of correspondence and phone conversations and does not permit their monitoring or review except by a reasoned judicial order for a defined period, and Article 309 bis of the Penal Code punishes with imprisonment anyone who records or transmits conversations that took place in a private setting without the consent of the parties. Broadcasting a recording of a private call on a satellite channel, whoever its subject and whatever its content, is a criminal act unless its source is a publicly announced court order, and no such order has been announced. Abd El-Rahim Ali is no stranger to this act; he is its best-known name in Egypt: in December 2013 and January 2014 he broadcast in his program “The Black Box” on “Cairo and the People” channel recordings he attributed to Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel of the April 6 Movement, former MP Mostafa Al-Najar, and poet Abd El-Rahman Youssef, then to Wael Ghoneim, Mansour’s partner in “We Are All Khaled Said.” Five rights organizations including the Egyptian Initiative and the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information called on the Prosecutor General to investigate the wiretapping and broadcasting as two crimes prohibited by the Penal Code, Al-Najar filed a lawsuit, and then-Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim denied at a press conference any ministry connection to the leaks, while Ali defended the broadcast by citing the Journalists Syndicate’s ethics code. In October 2020 the box turned on its owner when activists circulated a recording attributed to him saying that the President himself could not refer him to the prosecution, to which he responded that the Brotherhood had fabricated it with voice-generation software. On September 6, Adeeb had hosted him in the studio to present a new “Black Box” about Brotherhood funding in Europe, so Friday’s phone call is a continuation of a thirteen-year line that began with calls from the first administrator of “We Are All Khaled Said” and ended with calls from the second. The common denominator in this entire discourse is that it works with a vocabulary, not with documents: it calls partners a “network,” editors “elements,” journalistic assignments “tasking,” tracking a plane that broadcasts its location “intelligence surveillance,” and a publicly filed tax return a “revelation.” When each word is translated to its original meaning, nothing remains of the narrative except a registered organization funding a publicly disclosed platform operating with tools available to everyone.
The recordings and numbers appeared on screen before the six were presented to a prosecutor or faced a single question, meaning the trial of public opinion preceded the investigation, and the content of the intelligence gathered, which should remain with the prosecution, became material for an evening program. This is what the Syndicate source meant when he told Mada Masr that the form of the news and the leaks signals an escalation by the security bodies.
A Report Dated Yesterday
On the same Friday night, the “Al-Masry Al-Youm” website published a report saying that the Supreme State Security Prosecution had decided to detain “6 defendants from those running the Matsda2sh page” for fifteen days pending investigations, and that the prosecution was continuing to investigate them to determine each one’s role and what the intelligence had found about the funding and communication with the person running the page from abroad. The report carried the date of Thursday, October 1 at 23:44, but did not appear to readers on the website until the evening of Friday, October 2. It contained no case number and no charge text, and reproduced the same accusations in the ministry’s statement and the “sources” material. On Saturday morning, Islam Salama, lawyer at the Egyptian Initiative, submitted a request to the Supreme State Security Prosecution, then wrote on his page that he had ascertained the report was untrue, that the prosecution had not yet investigated the journalists, and that it would enable the defense to attend if they were brought. Zawia3 attempted to contact the Al-Masry Al-Youm editor-in-chief to ask about the report’s source and date and received no response; the website did not remove the report despite the controversy it had generated on social media. Salama and lawyer Nasser Amin, Director of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and Legal Profession, suggested in their statements to Mada Masr that the decision the report refers to, if it exists at all, may be a prosecution authorization for investigative bodies to detain the six for up to thirty days without presenting them before the prosecution, under the anti-terrorism law, a reading that would mean the six could remain unknown for a full month under legal cover.
On Saturday, October 3, Al-Balshy submitted two requests to the Prosecutor General’s office and the First General Prosecutor of the Supreme State Security Prosecution to clarify what “Al-Masry Al-Youm” had published. The request recounted that a Syndicate delegation including council members Mahmoud Kamel and Iman Awf and four lawyers from its legal department had gone to the prosecution’s offices in the Fifth Settlement on Thursday morning after the Interior Ministry’s statement, submitted formal requests to attend investigations, and remained at the prosecution’s premises throughout the day asking whether any investigation of the colleagues was underway, with no one telling them anything and no case number or charge sheet being shown. They were then surprised by the detention report. The request cited Article 69 of Journalists Syndicate Law No. 76 of 1970 requiring the prosecution to notify the Syndicate council of any complaint connected to journalistic work a reasonable time before investigating, granting the chairman or his delegate the right to attend the investigation, and Articles 5 and 53 under which the Syndicate defends all actual practitioners of the profession, registered or trainee, and concluded with a demand for disclosure of the detention location, the justifications for the arrest, and immediate release. Awf had spent Friday noon, her day off, in the Prosecutor General’s office in anticipation of the six being suddenly brought in; she told “Index on Censorship” that she feared they would be brought in alone, because security ministry statements are usually followed by a quick presentation before the prosecution, according to the organization’s report in which the Egyptian Initiative estimated the number of journalists detained in connection with their work in Egypt at twenty-six after this campaign, with Lobna Darwish, the Initiative’s Advocacy Director, saying that the authorities this time did not target a specific journalist for a specific piece, but sought to take an entire independent platform out of service by arresting its whole team, and that the ministry’s statement treats journalistic activity as a national security matter, meaning in practice the use of the counter-terrorism framework to circumvent fair trial guarantees and the constitutional prohibition on imprisonment in publishing crimes.
It should be noted that on August 20, Information Minister Dia Rashwan had directed to journalists a message he described as a “necessary chat” announcing an annual media meeting in December in implementation of presidential directives to allow multiple viewpoints. On September 21 he proposed to editors-in-chief of licensed websites a “unified entity” for online outlets, to which the Syndicate’s Secretary General Gamal Abd El-Rahim responded that any parallel syndicate violates Article 77 of the Constitution, and Deputy Chairman Mohamed Al-Jarhi submitted a memo demanding the minister be transferred to the non-practicing list. One week after the proposal to organize digital outlets into an entity, an entire digital platform’s team was arrested. In the same month the government was preparing a conference to present its achievements to citizens in October by directive of President Abd El-Fattah Al-Sisi, and Mada Masr cited sources saying that the hardline current within the services had argued that “Matsda2sh” was preparing to critique the state ahead of this conference. On the same day as the ministry’s statement, Thursday, October 1, Reuters disclosed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had in a letter dated September 21 waived $320 million in military aid to Egypt from human rights conditions on national security grounds and Egypt’s role since the American war on Iran, with an Egyptian official welcoming the decision, saying conditionality does not serve relations between states. The following day, Democratic Representatives Don Beyer and Suzan DelBene, co-chairs of the Egypt Human Rights Caucus in Congress, called for the immediate and unconditional release of the six. The entire campaign came days before the new Code of Criminal Procedure was due to take effect in October, the law the state marketed as a historic remedy for pre-trial detention, which was greeted by six detainees with no known location and no charge.
International and Domestic Solidarity
Solidarity with the six expanded across three circles that have not converged on an Egyptian press case with this breadth in years. In the international circle, CPJ’s Middle East Coordinator Sarah Qadah said that five of the six not being registered with the Syndicate provides no justification for their detention and that any licensing dispute is resolved through transparent administrative or judicial procedures, not arrest. International Federation of Journalists Secretary General Anthony Bellanger said the colleagues were arrested for one reason: doing their work. Reporters Without Borders described the incident as the first in Egypt to place an entire newsroom behind bars. Article 19 demanded in its statement an end to all forms of targeting the platform. The joint call hosted by the Tahrir Institute gathered signatures from more than eighty organizations and media outlets, alongside Human Rights Watch, which placed the incident in the category of enforced disappearance, and Index on Censorship, which argued that the state treats journalism as a national security matter. In the Arab circle, the Union of Journalists in Lebanon, the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists, the Syrian Journalists Association, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, and the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate signed a statement declaring solidarity with the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate and its actions, saying that targeting journalists harms not only those in the profession but the public’s right to knowledge, unions that know this type of campaign from their own experience. The domestic circle, the weightiest because its costs are paid in Cairo, began with dozens of journalists who signed a statement hours before the ministry’s statement demanding the release of the six colleagues, their safety, and disclosure of their whereabouts, with some describing the terrorism charge to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed as “the standard charge” affixed to anyone working in independent journalism away from security interference, while Syndicate council member Mahmoud Kamel told Agence France-Presse that the incident was “flagrant” and that the only crime the detained committed was doing their work of researching, analyzing, and uncovering facts. Egyptian rights organizations then joined the journalists in signing the global call from inside the country despite the cost of signing: the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, the Egyptian Front for Human Rights, the Egyptian Platform for Human Rights, and the Al-Nadeem Center Against Violence and Torture. Then the parties: the Constitution Party issued a statement condemning the arrest of the team and saying that press freedom is neither a privilege granted by authority nor a right restricted by the nature of journalistic treatment, but an original constitutional right and a guarantee of society’s right to knowledge and accountability. The Civil Democratic Movement issued a statement expressing deep concern at the “unprecedented escalation” that led to the detention of the entire editorial team, declaring solidarity with the Syndicate’s position and its chairman’s complaint and with Matsda2sh’s statement, and demanding the immediate release of the six and of all those imprisoned in opinion cases.
This solidarity took physical form on the fifth day. On Friday night, after approximately one hundred hours since the first raid, Matsda2sh published a call to all journalists in Egypt, describing what was happening as a grave event in the history of Egyptian journalism: an entire newsroom arrested for no reason except that its members practiced serious journalism, with colleagues facing a smear campaign whose cost they and their families pay with their professional reputations and personal lives. The call said to journalists: “We are not asking you to defend Matsda2sh only. Defend yourselves too. Today it is us, and tomorrow it is you.” It invited journalists, Syndicate members and non-members alike, to a symbolic sit-in at the Journalists Syndicate from three to five p.m. on Saturday, October 3, and young journalists circulated the invitation under their own names. The state’s response to the call came before it began: from Saturday noon police imposed a security cordon around the roads leading to the Syndicate’s premises on Abd Al-Khaliq Tharwat Street, set up checkpoints to search passersby, asked some to show identity cards to verify they were not journalists, while Syndicate officials asked those arriving not to go outside or stand on the steps where they habitually stood, but to gather in the main lobby to avoid any friction with the forces deployed around the building. The sit-in thus took place inside the walls while the police stood outside sorting passersby into journalists and non-journalists. In those same hours, Iman Awf said the Supreme State Security Prosecution denied to the Syndicate delegation that any investigation of the six was underway, making the prosecution’s denial the only official evidence that the “Al-Masry Al-Youm” report has no basis, and that the six were still, at the end of their fifth day, outside any disclosed procedure. At five p.m. the same day, the Syndicate had scheduled, days before the campaign, an open discussion on legal avenues for extending Syndicate protection to all genuine practitioners and regulating the rights of those working in news websites. In a single building at a single hour converged a sit-in for six journalists with no official protection, a discussion on how to protect them, and a security cordon deciding who had the right to enter for both; which is the question Zawia3 raised one day before the raids, in an article about the description written in police reports against an entire generation making Egyptian journalism from outside the Syndicate’s registration rolls.
The open questions remain more than the answers, and they are questions directed at the state before the journalists: Where are Mohamed Ashraf Abu Umaira, Abdullah Qadri, Islam Barakat, Omar Hilal, Mohamed Mahmoud, and Mohamed Adel being detained? If the prosecution issued a detention order as “Al-Masry Al-Youm” reported, why was it not communicated to the lawyers who submitted requests at its offices, nor to the Syndicate that spent an entire day in its corridors? If it did not issue one, who gave the website the report and why did it date it to yesterday? Who gave Abd El-Rahim Ali recordings of private calls, and under what legal authority were they broadcast on a satellite channel before the six had seen a single investigator? What meaning does an official statement have that holds a platform accountable for the absence of a license that the services refused to grant when requested? Zawia3 had already asked the Public Prosecution, in its article about the arrest, in what legal text the crime of matching a report against a document falls, and the answer has not arrived. What arrived instead was five days of official silence filled by media that knows everything about the accused except their location, and a security cordon around the Syndicate that knows by name everyone asking about them.
