Prosecutors in Egypt have charged six journalists working for the independent fact-checking platform Matsda2sh with belonging to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, according to their lawyer.
Nabeh al-Ganadi said on Monday that the men were accused of joining a terrorist group, funding terrorism, publishing “fake news”, and using social media to call for acts of terrorism, he added. Matsda2sh has denied the allegations.
Later, Ganadi said the State Security Prosecution had remanded five of them in custody for 15 days, and that the sixth was still being interrogated.
The journalists’ arrests last week were condemned by international human rights and press freedom organisations.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the detention of Matsda2sh’s entire newsroom a “grave escalation in Egypt’s campaign against independent journalism”.
It said the country remained one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, with 25 currently imprisoned or detained.
President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has overseen what human rights groups say is an unprecedented crackdown on dissent since he led the military’s overthrow of his predecessor, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi, in 2013.
Tens of thousands of people have been detained, mainly Muslim Brotherhood officials and supporters but also leading secular and liberal activists, media workers and academics.
Matsda2sh, whose name means “Do Not Believe” in Arabic, was founded in 2018 to “resist the flow of false or misleading news”, according to its website.
It regularly fact-checks statements made by Egyptian officials and carries out investigative reporting in Egypt and other Arab countries.
Security personnel arrested the six Matsda2sh journalists – Abdullah Qadry, Mohammed Ashraf Abu Emeira, Islam Barakat, Omar Helal, Mohammed Mahmoud, and Mohammed Adel – in a series of raids on their homes across Egypt on 28 and 29 September, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), whose lawyers are defending them.
Initially, no information was provided about where they were being held or the reasons for their detention, the EIPR said.
On Thursday, the Egyptian interior ministry confirmed their arrests and accused Matsda2sh of seeking to destabilise the country through disinformation.
It said the platform was unlicensed and operated from abroad, and that its founder, Abdel Rahman Mansour, was member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In an interview with the CPJ that day,, external Mansour insisted that the accusations “misrepresent who we are and the work we do”.
“We have no affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the authorities know this,” he said.
On Monday, the EIPR said most of the detained journalists had testified before the State Security Prosecution that they were “tortured at National Security Agency facilities in the days following their arrests, before being brought before any judicial authority”.
The journalists reported “beatings, forced stripping, electric shocks and threats to harm them or their families”, it added.
The interior ministry denied that they had been tortured or mistreated.
A ministry source said the EIPR’s allegations were “unfounded and come in the context of attempts to evade the charges levelled at them”.
