Category Archives: Egypt

Egypt says film-maker died in cell after drinking hand sanitiser

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Shady Habash had been held in Cairo’s Tora prison for more than two years without trial

Egypt’s public prosecutor has said a young film-maker who died in prison had mistakenly drunk hand sanitiser in his cell, thinking it was water.

Shady Habash died inside Cairo’s Tora prison complex on 2 May. He had been held for more than two years without trial, accused of membership of a terrorist group and “spreading false news” after he produced a music video critical of Egypt’s president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

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Egypt has made journalism a crime with crackdown, says Amnesty International

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Egyptian government using pandemic to tighten control of media and quash dissent, rights group reports

Journalism in Egypt has effectively become a crime over the past four years, Amnesty International says, as authorities clamp down on media outlets and muzzle dissent.

As the number of coronavirus infections in Egypt continues to rise, the government is strengthening its control over information instead of upholding transparency, the London-based rights group said in a report released on Sunday.

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‘It’ll cause a water war’: divisions run deep as filling of Nile dam nears

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Despite Egypt’s fears of ‘hydro hegemony’ and concerns it will worsen water shortages in Sudan, Ethiopia’s controversial dam project is close to fruition

From his office in central Khartoum, Ahmed al-Mufti prepares every day for what he believes is the water war to come.

This conviction led Mufti, a prominent human rights lawyer and water expert, to quit the Sudanese delegation that is negotiating Nile water issues with Egypt and Ethiopia.

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Twitter deletes 20,000 fake accounts linked to Saudi, Serbian and Egyptian governments

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Accounts also linked to Honduras and Indonesia violated policy and were ‘targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation’

Twitter has deleted 20,000 fake accounts linked to the governments of Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Honduras and Indonesia, saying they violated company policy and were a “targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation”.

Yoel Roth, the head of site integrity, said the removal of the accounts was part of the company’s ongoing “work to detect and investigate state-backed information operations”.

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Egypt forces Guardian journalist to leave after coronavirus story

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Ruth Michaelson had reported on study that questioned country’s official tally of cases

Egyptian authorities have forced a Guardian journalist to leave the country after she reported on a scientific study that said Egypt was likely to have many more coronavirus cases than have been officially confirmed.

Ruth Michaelson, who has lived in and reported from Egypt since 2014, was advised last week by western diplomats that the country’s security services wanted her to leave immediately after her press accreditation was revoked and she was asked to attend a meeting with authorities about her visa status.

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African nations impose stricter measures as coronavirus spreads

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Governments warn disease will cause huge challenges for continent’s health services

Countries across Africa have imposed wide-ranging and stringent new measures as the coronavirus begins to spread more rapidly across the continent.

Though the continent is still far behind Europe and Asia in the total numbers of Covid-19 cases, the disease has now reached about half of its countries. Algeria has 48 confirmed cases, Egypt 110, while South Africa has 62, according to the World Health Organization and national governments on Monday. Other countries have fewer cases, mostly in single figures.

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UK urged to act over men facing death in Egypt for alleged childhood crimes

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Foreign secretary asked to intervene as death penalty hangs over four young men at mass trial in Cairo

A group of British MPs has called on the foreign secretary to intervene in the case of four young men facing a death sentence in Cairo for crimes they allegedly committed as children.

One of them is Ammar El Sudany, who was in the bath when Egyptian security forces raided his home.

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Egypt announces 33 new Covid-19 cases on cruise ship

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Prime minister claims ‘Egypt is safe and the situation is under control’, though 45 of the ship’s passengers are now infected

Egypt has announced 33 new cases of Covid-19 as the Arab world’s most populous nation works to contain both the virus and public concern.

Thirty-three additional infected passengers were found onboard a cruise ship that had travelled between the southern Egyptian cities of Aswan and Luxor. Twelve cases on the same ship were announced yesterday, bringing the number of infections onboard so far to 45.

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‘She exists out of time’: Umm Kulthum, Arab music’s eternal star

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With a voice adored by Bob Dylan, Robert Plant and millions across the Arab world, Umm Kulthum rejected gender norms with her powerful, political music. But can her 90-minute songs work in a new stage musical?

You hear the Umm Kulthum cafe before you see it. Violins swoon and a monumental voice surges from a doorway in Cairo’s Tawfiqia neighbourhood. Outside, couples smoke shisha on plastic chairs, dwarfed by two immense golden busts depicting the singer known variously as “the star of the east”, “mother of the Arabs” and “Egypt’s fourth pyramid”.

Umm Kulthum recorded about 300 songs over a 60-year career and her words of love, loss and longing drift reliably from taxis, radios and cafes across the Arab world today, 45 years after her death. Despite singing complex Arabic poetry, she influenced some of the west’s greatest singers. Bob Dylan said: “She’s great. She really is.” Shakira and Beyoncé have performed dance routines to her music. Maria Callas called her “the incomparable voice”.

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Mubarak’s fate haunts Egypt’s leaders, and gives hope to its people | Jack Shenker

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The late dictator’s downfall is a cautionary tale for those who seek to obliterate dissent in a country of 100 million people

On 28 January 2011, a reporter colleague and I boarded a ghostly Cairo metro train travelling east below the Nile, from Giza to the city centre. Far above us, the capital was ablaze. Pockets of fighting between anti-government protesters and police shook the streets; bridges across the river were revolutionary battlegrounds; ribbons of smoke and teargas filled the sky. In a final, futile attempt at self-preservation, the country’s authoritarian regime had shut down mobile networks and switched off the internet, so reliable news was hard to come by and we didn’t know who would emerge triumphant from what had already been termed Egypt’s “day of rage”.

Related: Hosni Mubarak obituary

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Hosni Mubarak buried with full military honours

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Egypt pays tribute to former president, who died at 91, amid tight security in Cairo

Former Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak has been buried in Cairo with a full military funeral, following his death aged 91.

Mubarak’s body was transported from a mosque on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital to the family cemetery on Wednesday amid tight security. His coffin was pulled by horse-drawn carriages alongside a procession led by his sons Gamal and Alaa Mubarak and the current president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, flanked by military top brass and leading religious figures.

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Hosni Mubarak: the rise and fall of the Egyptian dictator – video obituary

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Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s autocratic former president who ruled with an iron fist for three decades before being toppled during the Arab spring protests in 2011, has died aged 91. We look back at the life and legacy of one of Egypt's most notorious leaders, and the corruption, incompetence and human rights violations that took place under his rule

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British tourists land in Sharm el-Sheikh on first flights since 2015 plane bombing

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Celebrations as a TUI flight from Gatwick becomes one of the first to land in the Egyptian resort town after the bombing of a Russian airliner

British tourists have arrived on one of the first flights from the UK to the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh since restrictions were lifted.

Flights between Britain and Sharm el-Sheikh were halted in November 2015, following the bombing of a Russian airliner soon after take-off from Sharm el-Sheikh airport, which killed all 224 people on board.

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Giulio Regeni’s parents urge Italy to help student held in Egypt

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Human rights activist Patrick Zaky had been studying at the University of Bologna

The family of an Italian doctoral student murdered in Cairo have urged “democratic governments” to intervene in the case of an Egyptian master’s student in Italy who was detained on arrival in Egypt last week.

Paola and Claudio Regeni, the parents of Giulio Regeni, whose mutilated corpse was found in 2016, called on Italy to do more to help Patrick Zaky, an Egyptian student and activist studying at the University of Bologna who was detained and reportedly tortured on arrival in Cairo to visit his family.

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Italy alarmed after Egyptian studying in Bologna arrested in Cairo

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Case of Patrick Zaky doing master’s on gender and human rights echoes that of murdered Italian student Giulio Regeni

An Egyptian researcher who is studying in Italy has been arrested on arrival in Cairo on charges of “harming national security”, sparking alarm among Italy’s authorities who fear a repeat of the case of murdered Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni.

Patrick Zaky, a graduate student at the University of Bologna, was arrested at Cairo airport during a visit to see family. Zaky is a researcher on gender and human rights at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), which said he was covertly taken from the airport and interrogated at facilities belonging to Egypt’s national security agency in Cairo and Mansoura, his home town.

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FGM doctor arrested in Egypt after girl, 12, bleeds to death

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Child had been taken by her family to have the procedure, still prevalent in the country despite new laws to combat it

A doctor has been arrested after the death of a 12-year-old girl he had performed female genital mutilation (FGM) on.

Nada Hassan Abdel-Maqsoud bled to death at a private clinic in Manfalout, close to the city of Assiut, after her parents, uncle and aunt took her for the procedure.

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Giulio Regeni: hopes rest on Italian inquiry on fourth anniversary of death

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Italy demands concrete actions from Egypt, especially on judicial cooperation

Four years after the mutilated body of the Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni was discovered in Cairo, Italian politicians and officials are pinning hope for fresh information on an Italian parliamentary inquiry, as Egypt continues to obstruct investigations.

Regeni’s body was found on 3 February 2016, nine days after he had disappeared in the Egyptian capital. His mother, Paola, said later she only recognised his corpse by the “tip of his nose”, given the extensive torture he had endured. Widespread suspicions that Egyptian security forces were responsible for his disappearance and murder were reinforced in 2018 when Italian prosecutors named five officials as suspects.

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Threat of jail looms over even mildest critics under Egyptian crackdown

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Nine years after uprising, Egyptians face strict controls on political activity and free speech

Mohammed Abdellatif did not see himself as a political activist. As a dentist in Cairo, his concerns were focused on healthcare and issues such as a lack of medical supplies and low wages for doctors.

Then at 3am one day last September, 50 armed security agents stormed his family home. Abdellatif’s alleged crime was to have launched a social media campaign demanding better pay and conditions for health workers in Egypt. The previous month while working at a public hospital in Giza, he had started the Twitter hashtag “Egyptian doctors are angry”.

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Talk like an Egyptian: mummy’s voice heard 3,000 years after death

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Researchers in UK recreate Nesyamun’s sound using 3D version of his vocal tract

The “voice” of an ancient Egyptian priest has been heard for the first time since he died and was mummified 3,000 years ago, researchers have said.

Nesyamun lived under the pharaoh Rameses XI, who reigned around the beginning of the 11th century BC.

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