Journalist Mohamed Ashraf Abu Umaira appeared before the Supreme State Security Prosecution at ten p.m. on Saturday, October 3, after six days of disappearance, in the first appearance of any of the six “Matsda2sh” platform journalists before an investigating authority. The prosecution decided to detain him for 15 days pending investigations, while his five colleagues remain missing.
Islam Salama, the platform journalists’ lawyer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, told Zawia3 on Sunday morning that he had managed to attend the investigation on the basis of a request he had previously submitted to the prosecution to attend investigations with the Matsda2sh team, and that the prosecution investigated Abu Umaira alone and leveled three charges against him: joining a terrorist organization, publishing and broadcasting false news and false statements, and using a social media account, in Case No. 8083 of 2026, Supreme State Security register. The investigation lasted approximately ten consecutive hours, from Saturday evening until Sunday morning, and ended with the detention order. The Egyptian Initiative said in its statement that the prosecution detained Abu Umaira after five days of his disappearance, and that its questions revolved around a number of publications on the platform, how their subjects were chosen, and the purpose of their publication, and that the defense team requested he be referred to hospital due to his chronic illnesses, with the prosecution allowing him to obtain his medications, according to what Hossam Bahgat told Mada Masr. Salama adds that the defense team is monitoring investigation dates for the five remaining journalists, Abdullah Qadri, Islam Barakat, Omar Hilal, Mohamed Mahmoud, and Mohamed Adel, to attend as soon as they are scheduled. But monitoring does not mean anyone has informed the defense of a date or location: as of Sunday noon, no investigation date had been set for the five, their families and lawyers still did not know their detention location, and no authority had acknowledged holding them, leaving five of the six in the category of the forcibly disappeared, even though the appearance of their colleague suggests they will be presented before the same prosecution one after another.
This development came three days after a report published by “Al-Masry Al-Youm” dated the night of Thursday, October 1, saying that the Supreme State Security Prosecution had decided to detain “6 defendants from those running the Matsda2sh page” for 15 days pending investigations and was continuing to investigate them, adding that National Security intelligence found that one defendant had been apprehended three times before. The report had contained no case number or charge sheet, and Hossam Bahgat, the Egyptian Initiative’s director, denied its accuracy after directly contacting the head of the Supreme State Security Prosecution, saying the colleagues had not even appeared before the prosecution as of that date. Then Iman Awf, Journalists Syndicate council member and head of its Freedoms Committee, said on Saturday that the prosecution denied to a Syndicate delegation having conducted any investigation of the six. What was published Thursday about six journalists became, three days later, an order concerning a single journalist, on charges that no one had faced the day the report was published, while the five others remain outside any disclosed order.
In the Category of the Forcibly Disappeared
Salama had told Zawia3 hours before Abu Umaira’s appearance that there was no disclosed legal process whatsoever concerning the six colleagues since the moment of their arrest, and that they were “in the category of the forcibly disappeared” under complete information blackout about their detention locations. He described what “Al-Masry Al-Youm” had published as “entirely inaccurate,” explaining: “The colleagues have not been presented to the prosecution yet, they have not been subjected to any investigations, and there is no case registered with a number or official report we have been notified of.” He says he submitted a formal request to the Prosecutor General and the head of the Supreme State Security Prosecution, relying on the Interior Ministry’s own statement acknowledging the journalists’ arrest, to investigate whether their detention had exceeded the legal time limits for holding someone without referral to investigating authorities. He stresses that “even under the assumption that they were arrested under the anti-terrorism law, the law requires authorities to notify families and lawyers of detention locations and enable the defense to formally challenge arrest decisions,” and that the defense team had received no official response to its requests, while the prosecution orally informed it that it would enable lawyers to attend investigations as soon as the journalists were presented, which happened on Saturday night with Abu Umaira alone.
On Saturday morning, after four days of disappearance, the Egyptian Initiative’s lawyers submitted a complaint requesting an investigation into the circumstances of the arrest of the six journalists, after security forces refused to show their families the judicial warrant for arrest and detention. The families of the six had sent 17 telegrams to the Prosecutor General, the First General Prosecutor of the Supreme State Security Prosecution, and the Minister of Interior without any response, making the eighteenth complaint the one that preceded the first appearance.
A Sit-In
Abu Umaira’s appearance came on the same night that the Journalists Syndicate saw an open sit-in with the participation of dozens of journalists, protesting the arrest of their colleagues and the failure to disclose their detention locations or present them to investigating authorities. Amid heavy security presence around the Syndicate building in plainclothes, uniformed officers, police cars, and Interior Ministry minivans, journalists held a symbolic sit-in that the Matsda2sh Facebook page had called for on Thursday evening, in response to the arrest of the six journalists who constitute the entire team of the platform specializing in verifying Egyptian and Arab content.
The Syndicate council called for an emergency meeting this coming Monday to discuss the repercussions of the arrest of the six and examine the necessary procedures and actions for dealing with the crisis, with Journalists Syndicate Chairman Khaled Al-Balshy and eight council members in attendance, during the sit-in that lasted more than two hours.
Al-Balshy tells Zawia3 that the Syndicate is negotiating with “the relevant bodies” regarding the Matsda2sh journalists, while refraining from disclosing details of the ongoing movements, noting that his information and actions are limited to what is happening in the framework of legal memos and negotiation without revealing the nature of these negotiations. He adds that the six journalists’ detention locations remain unknown despite the Interior Ministry announcing their arrest on Thursday, and that the Syndicate’s lawyers communicated with the Public Prosecution and reviewed its data records without finding that any of them had been presented before it until that point, which changed after midnight with Abu Umaira’s appearance.
The Syndicate had submitted on Saturday morning two requests to the Prosecutor General and the Supreme State Security Prosecution to clarify the truth of what “Al-Masry Al-Youm” had published about an order to detain the six for 15 days without notifying the Syndicate, while noting the necessity of informing it of investigation dates in implementation of the guarantees in the Syndicate’s law, and disclosing the detention location. The two requests recounted that a delegation including council members Mahmoud Kamel and Iman Awf and four lawyers from the 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 there throughout the day without anyone informing it that an investigation was being conducted, a report filed, a case number assigned, or a charge sheet issued.
Al-Balshy explains that the legal memo rests on the principle that a journalist bears responsibility for the materials he or she publishes, not for the entity or platform through which he or she works, as well as the guarantees established by the Syndicate’s law to regulate dealings with journalists. He notes that the Syndicate insists on extending its protection umbrella to include journalists not registered on its roster, that it has previously intervened in similar cases to defend non-member journalists, and that Article 35 of the Syndicate’s law contains provisions relating to making training and publication available prior to registration. The Journalists Syndicate founding law No. 76 of 1970 stipulates that the Syndicate council or the branch syndicate council must be notified of any complaint against any journalist connected to his journalistic work a reasonable time before commencing investigation, and that the Chairman or the branch syndicate chairman has the right to attend the investigation personally or through a delegate.
Iman Awf tells Zawia3 that the Syndicate began its negotiations with the relevant bodies to secure the journalists’ release from the first moment it was informed of the incident through the families of the colleagues, and that the Chairman contacted various relevant bodies as soon as he learned of the matter to work toward ending the crisis. She adds that all options remain on the table for discussion before the Syndicate council and General Assembly, in both negotiation tracks and potential escalation steps, and that no one will take a unilateral decision, and that the Syndicate, its council, and General Assembly are in a state of continuous session to follow developments. She explains that the Syndicate submitted two complaints on Saturday morning, one to the Prosecutor General and another to the Human Rights Office at the Ministry of Interior, alongside continuing contact with relevant bodies, and that the legal unit is following the upcoming investigation while ready to attend it as soon as it is notified. On escalation she says the Syndicate is awaiting what developments produce, and that the nature of escalation steps cannot be determined before the journalists’ legal situation becomes clear, and that it will reassess its options if they are presented to the prosecution and detention orders are issued, which had begun to happen hours later with the first detention order.
Demands to Hold Inciters Accountable
The meeting witnessed demands from journalists to discuss what they described as incitement and smear campaigns targeting members of the Matsda2sh team since their arrest, through social media posts and journalistic material, with some asking about the Syndicate’s role in taking disciplinary action against members who violated the journalistic code of honor by publishing false reports such as the “Al-Masry Al-Youm” report.
One journalist asked about the absence of some Syndicate council members from the meeting, considering the case to extend beyond the six journalists and to touch on press freedom and the broader journalistic community. Al-Balshy replied that some members had their own circumstances, that the Syndicate had not issued formal invitations to members, and that “participation is open” as he described it, and that attendance is part of the syndicate’s space.
Some of the participating female journalists demanded the identification of escalatory steps to pressure for the disclosure of the colleagues’ fate and their release, especially after four days had passed since their arrest without knowledge of their detention locations, and proposed organizing a protest stand or sit-in inside the Syndicate. The discussion ended with agreement to organize a sit-in inside the Syndicate until the council’s emergency meeting on Monday, while leaving the organization of attendance times and its duration to participants. The attendees unanimously agreed that the General Assembly retains the right to take whatever decisions it sees fit if the council’s decisions do not meet its demands, including organizing protest stands on the Syndicate steps, while Syndicate activities continue until the six’s legal situation becomes clear and their detention locations are disclosed.
Participants raised banners reading “Matsda2sh is Samsung journalism,” “Down with instructional journalism,” “Long live the journalists’ struggle,” “Journalism is not a crime,” “Matsda2sh,” and “Freedom for journalists,” chanting inside the Syndicate demanding the immediate release of the disappeared journalists, including “Bring the six out of the cells, freedom for every prisoner.”
The security cordon remained outside throughout the sit-in, with police closing the roads leading to the Syndicate’s premises on Abd Al-Khaliq Tharwat Street, setting up checkpoints to search passersby and asking some to show identity cards, while Syndicate officials asked those arriving not to go outside or stand on the steps where they habitually stood, and to gather only in the main lobby to avoid any friction with the forces deployed around the building.
During the meeting participants asked about the position of Information Minister Dia Rashwan regarding the fate of the six journalists, and neither the Chairman nor any council member commented. Rashwan had directed on August 20 a “necessary chat” message to journalists presenting visions and proposals to advance the press to build public awareness and express societal issues, and called for opening the floor to objective media dialogue encompassing multiple viewpoints, and a meeting on December 3, 2026 to discuss challenges and opportunities and produce practical recommendations for media development.
The Syndicate Discusses the Crisis of Union Protection
After the discussion of the sit-in plan, the Syndicate held another session, which had been scheduled before the campaign by days, to discuss proposals for extending union protection coverage to online journalism and including those working in the profession within Syndicate membership. Al-Balshy said the Syndicate provides protection to non-member journalists, but raised questions about how to provide funding to guarantee them the necessary protection and support during their work.
In an intervention by a participating journalist, he pointed to the context of the current scene and what journalists are experiencing in terms of insecurity, considering the Syndicate to be facing a test of its independence and capacity to handle the crisis, and that the discussion concerns not the mechanisms for accommodating journalists and their joining the Syndicate so much as the absence of explanations for regularizing their situations. Journalist Gamal Fahmi proposed incorporating a draft amendment to the registration regulations into the core of the online journalists’ issue, in a way that allows addressing the situations of those whom current registration conditions prevent from joining. Another journalist said it was necessary to form a committee comprising council members and a number of Syndicate journalists to study the current law and its executive regulations and examine what can be amended or developed, in a way that prevents the recurrence of the same problems and helps the council devise a vision to present to the General Assembly.
This session places its finger on the gap through which the campaign entered: of the six journalists, only one is registered with the Syndicate, and five are trainees or unregistered, which the Interior Ministry’s own statement exploited when it said “one of them is registered with the Journalists Syndicate and the rest are not,” as if registration is what makes journalism journalism, while the Syndicate defends under Articles 5 and 53 of its law every actual practitioner of the profession, registered or trainee. Zawia3 had raised this question 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.
Six Days: From the Raid to the Statement
The events began late on the evening of Monday, September 28, when security forces stormed the homes of Abu Umaira and Qadri, confiscated their electronic devices, and took them to an undisclosed location, before the circle widened during the dawn and day of Tuesday, September 29 to encompass simultaneous raids in three governorates: Barakat in Gharbia, Hilal in Port Said, and Mahmoud and Adel from a Cairo street. By Tuesday evening the platform’s entire team present inside Egypt was in detention, cut off from contact with their families or lawyers, with confiscations extending to computers and phones including belongings of family members, according to documentation by the Egyptian Initiative, which said that families visited official detention facilities during the following two days without official acknowledgment of their relatives’ presence, leading rights organizations to characterize the first hours of detention as enforced disappearance.
On Wednesday, September 30, Al-Balshy and the Syndicate council demanded, in a complaint to the Prosecutor General and a grievance to the Interior Minister, the immediate disclosure of detention locations, enabling the six to have legal representation, and their release on the Syndicate’s guarantee with a pledge to ensure their appearance before any investigation, noting that at least one of them was registered on its roster and that the arrest violated Article 54 of the Constitution. The moment the ministry’s statement was issued on Thursday morning, October 1, a dispute over procedures erupted: the ministry said it had notified the Chairman “at the time” of the arrest of the registered journalist, while Syndicate sources told “Al-Manassa” website that the Syndicate received no prior or simultaneous notification, but learned of the incident from the distress calls coming from families and the Initiative’s lawyers.
The ministry’s statement described the platform as an “unlicensed page run from abroad” broadcasting false news and distorting facts, and as “among the media committees of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organization, run from abroad by the fugitive Brotherhood member” Abd El-Rahman Shukri Mansour, assisted by elements inside the country who prepare materials in exchange for funding from abroad, saying it had been possible to “formalize procedures” and apprehend six members of this committee. The statement provided no accounting documents or evidence for the funding charge, did not detail the specific acts attributed to each journalist, and did not mention the detention location or the body conducting the investigation.
The platform responded the same day with a five-point statement entitled “We Are Not Brotherhood, Certified by the Security Services Themselves,” saying it is independent of any political organization inside or outside the country, that its eight-year record contains hundreds of corrections to statements and news promoted by parties and figures aligned with the Brotherhood and opposition figures abroad, that all team members are Egyptians residing inside Egypt, that Mansour left the country legally years ago and is wanted in no case and obtained from the Interior Ministry itself a criminal clearance certificate with no convictions, that three of the six underwent a background check approximately three years ago that ended with the platform being informed that no connection had been established between them and any political group or funding, and that employees receive their salaries through journalistic contracts and legitimate banking transactions via the Egyptian banking system. The last thing the platform published before the raid was a correction of false information about Presidential Decision No. 395 of 2026 delegating the Defense Minister in some presidential competencies, and among its most recent publications, according to Al Jazeera, was a fact-check of the Foreign Minister’s statements about the number of refugees in Egypt, and a piece on nepotism in Public Prosecution appointment transfers.
Tracing the platform’s history reveals that the “operating without a license” pretext was preceded by a licensing attempt that found no response: following the 2023 targeting, “Matsda2sh” sought to officially formalize its status and establish a publicly disclosed headquarters bringing its editors together inside Egypt on par with journalistic institutions, an offer met with complete silence from the security bodies, according to an informed journalistic source who spoke to Mada Masr. A well-informed Syndicate source told the same outlet that formalization offers and more flexible proposals were put again on the mediation table following the arrest without any receptiveness, and that the negotiations revealed the services threatening the “Brotherhood membership” charge as a pressure card to undercut the mediation track, a threat immediately translated into the Interior Ministry’s statement. And on this same argument Al-Balshy replied, according to what he told Mada Masr, when told that the platform was a page that had never applied for a license: “But I told you: don’t deal with it, not arrest it.”
The Arms of Defamation
The targeting of the platform did not stop at security procedures but was accompanied by a mobilization of media arms aligned with the state. Mohamed Al-Baz, editor-in-chief of “Al-Dustour” newspaper belonging to the United Media Services Company, wrote a post describing the platform as a “Brotherhood cell” and saying that what it produces is not fact-checking but doubt-casting content that contributes to manufacturing rumors to strike at state stability. The campaign deepened on television on Friday evening in the “Al-Hikaya” program on “MBC Masr,” when Amr Adeeb hosted writer Abd El-Rahim Ali, who broadcast audio recordings of undisclosed source and stripped of context claiming they were of Mansour and proved his Brotherhood connection, saying he possessed approximately five hundred calls of his. When Adeeb asked about the significance of raising the file as a security matter after eight years of the platform’s open operation, Ali continued his discourse describing fact-checking as harming the country, and not confronting the platform as high treason, saying: “When the country crumbles, what will be held accountable is the security bodies.” The scene was completed when the official Middle East News Agency and Al-Ahram Gate published personal photos of Mansour while invoking his family background and saying his father was arrested in 2008, before the state portal’s rush led it to write in another 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.
Journalists at the Saturday sit-in demanded that the Syndicate hold its members who participated in this campaign accountable, and that the “Al-Masry Al-Youm” report be referred to its investigation committee for violating the code of honor, the report that Zawia3 attempted to ask the website’s managing editor about regarding its source and date, received no response, and which the website did not remove despite the denials from the defense, the Syndicate, and the prosecution.
From Congress to the European Parliament
The case crossed its local boundaries within days. From Washington, 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 Matsda2sh journalists and an end to the escalating crackdown against what remains of independent media, with members of the Senate expressing support. In Brussels, European Parliament members expressed deep concern at the pace of the arrest and the circumstances of isolated detention, warning against depriving the detainees of their right to unconditional contact with their families and legal representatives, and calling on Egypt’s judiciary to comply with legal standards and inform the defense and families of the case’s trajectory transparently and immediately.
This parliamentary movement converged with a broad civil solidarity front: more than fifty Egyptian, regional, and international human rights and journalistic organizations signed on September 30 a joint call considering the targeting of “Matsda2sh” a new episode in the liquidation of public space, demanding an end to all forms of prosecution against its team and the release of all journalists detained because of their work in Egypt, with signatories later rising to more than eighty, including Egyptian organizations that signed from inside the country: 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, the Al-Nadeem Center, and the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms. This came alongside successive condemnations: Human Rights Watch demanded the release of the six and described their isolated detention as possibly amounting to enforced disappearance; Amnesty International said the journalists had been subjected to enforced disappearance and that what happened was a severe blow to freedom of expression; the Committee to Protect Journalists called for their immediate release and the dropping of any charges arising solely from their work; Reporters Without Borders, which described the incident as the first in Egypt to place an entire newsroom behind bars, and the International Federation of Journalists demanded disclosure of detention locations and immediate release. 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 Syndicate and its actions, saying that targeting journalists harms not only those in the profession but society’s right to knowledge.
Inside the country, a statement signed by dozens of journalists hours before the ministry’s statement demanded the release of the six colleagues, their safety, and disclosure of their whereabouts, with some describing the terrorism charge as “the standard charge” affixed to anyone working in independent journalism away from security interference. The Constitution Party issued a statement saying press freedom is not a privilege granted by authority but an original constitutional right and a guarantee of society’s right to knowledge and accountability, and the Civil Democratic Movement expressed deep concern at the unprecedented escalation, declaring solidarity with the Syndicate’s position and Matsda2sh’s statement.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said Egypt detains 25 journalists and is among the countries with high numbers of jailed journalists in the Middle East, ranking second in allegations of torture and beating of journalists in prisons since 1992 after Iran, while the Egyptian Initiative estimated the number of journalists detained because of their work in Egypt at twenty-six after this campaign.
Targeted Suppression, Not Reaction
Human rights lawyer Halim Hanish tells Zawia3 that the security assault on the six Matsda2sh journalists was not a circumstantial reaction or the product of the authorities’ annoyance at a specific investigative piece, but a deliberate and planned targeted suppression aimed at “disabling the entire work machine, paralyzing the production cycle, and liquidating the entire newsroom, not merely an individual prosecution of a journalist who covered a particular file.” He sees the background to the raids as “an immediate security translation and direct fulfillment of the content of President Abd El-Fattah Al-Sisi’s most recent speech, in which he focused on what he described as fighting rumors and questioning the state’s achievements,” and the recent measures as “an explicit declaration of war on the journalism of fact-checking in general in Egypt.”
Hanish adds: “The security services, whose identity of which one actually conducted the arrest and the detention decision is still shrouded in opacity, sought to create a deterrent model for the entire media sphere; they arrested the platform’s entire team present inside Egypt within approximately 48 hours, and kept them in disappearance without disclosing their detention locations or presenting them to investigating authorities even after the Interior Ministry’s statement was issued.” On the charge sheet and the parallel campaign, he says the ministry’s resort to the weapon of “the charge of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood” and the launching of a smear campaign against Mansour “reflects a propagandistic bankruptcy, repeated so often it no longer fools anyone,” and continues: “Everyone near and far knows with certainty that Abd El-Rahman Mansour and the platform’s journalists are about as far from the Brotherhood as it gets. This charge has become the only worn-out weapon the authority brandishes to strip any independent or fact-checking journalistic work of its legitimacy and demonize it before public opinion.”
Hanish notes that the danger of what happened lies in the fact that it “does not target one platform to end the matter there, but targets the community of fact-checking journalism and its practitioners as a whole in Egypt, in an endeavor to prevent any independent examination of official data and narratives.” He sees in the pressing movement of the past days an urgent necessity “to send an unambiguous message to the regime and its services that this journalistic and rights community has real backing and will not be left alone, and that violations of this kind carry a clear political and rights cost.” He praises the solidarity surge supporting the colleagues, saying he has “not witnessed solidarity with this momentum and coordination among journalists in at least four years,” and urges the continuation and escalation of this track as “the lever that may reduce the burden of this ordeal on the detained journalists, and the defensive wall and shield protecting the remaining fact-checkers and independent journalists who are still practicing their work outside prisons under the threat of targeting and arrest.”
From the Zambia Plane to the Entire Newsroom
“Matsda2sh” was founded in April 2018 as a platform for fact-checking and countering misinformation using open-source techniques, with the late investigative journalist Mohamed Abu Al-Ghaith contributing to laying its early foundations alongside Abd El-Rahman Mansour, one of the managers of the “We Are All Khaled Said” page during the January 25, 2011 revolution. Its Facebook page is followed by more than one million people while its website is blocked inside Egypt.
This was not the first confrontation with the authorities. On August 19, 2023, security bodies raided colleague Karim Asaad’s home in Al-Shorouk City and detained him for forty-eight hours, after forcing him to erase platform investigations that revealed details of the smuggling network and the personalities involved in the “Zambia plane” case, the private jet that departed Cairo Airport and was intercepted in Lusaka loaded with cash, gold bars, and security equipment, before being released following pressure from the Syndicate and civil society organizations. After that incident, as noted earlier, the platform offered to formalize its status and found no response.
The shift from attempting to silence a specific piece of coverage, as happened with Asaad, to dismantling the entire newsroom and detaining its whole team, according to rights and journalistic assessments, points to the security services transitioning to a phase of complete prohibition of the concept of “fact-checking” and imposing a comprehensive monopoly over the official narrative by criminalizing information and treating independent professional verification as a national security threat. The first official document in the case, born on Saturday night in Abu Umaira’s name and the number 8083, confirms this direction with its second charge: “publishing and broadcasting false news and false statements,” leveled at a journalist whose daily job was verifying false news. As for the five remaining, they are still where they have been for six days: in a location unknown to their lawyers, their Syndicate, or their families, no investigation date has been set for them and no body has acknowledged holding them, with the only change in their situation being that their colleague emerged from the same darkness into a case with a number, making the unknown awaiting them now known in form: three charges and fifteen days of detention. The defense team is tracking their dates hour by hour, while the Syndicate council’s emergency meeting the day after tomorrow deliberates whether the sit-in remains in the lobby or moves out to the steps.
