Egyptian intelligence charges leading journalist with 'spreading false information'

Hossam Baghat's recent investigative reporting has prominently featured the country's military intelligence service 

Tom Stevenson-Sunday 8 November 2015

One of the best known journalists and activists in Egypt has been summoned by Egypt's military intelligence agency and is set to be charged with “publishing inaccurate and false information that harms national interests”.

Hossam Bahgat, who is currently working as an investigative reporter for the local independent news website Mada Masr, was summoned from his Alexandria home early Sunday and held inside the military intelligence headquarters from 9am (7:00 GMT). 

He was kept inside the compound for more than seven hours, according to Heba Morayef, the former director of Human Rights Watch's Egypt office, who waited outside the headquarters building near Rabaa square in Cairo, the site of the 2013 Rabaa massacre.

Morayf said that after several hours, Bahgat's lawyers finally were able to visit him.

“Still waiting for him to come out,” Morayef said early in the day. 

Bahgat was a veteran opposition activist. In 2002, he founded one of Egypt's leading human rights institutes, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which documents human rights abuses by the government and conducts research on infringements that result from flawed public institutions.

In 2011, he was awarded Human Rights Watch's Alison Des Forges Award for “courageous and tireless” human rights work.

Bahgat was recognised both for his rights work and journalism, having worked on human rights issues during the Mubarak years, participated in the 2011 uprisings, and continued to scrutinise the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Morsi and Sisi governments.

Over the past two years, Bahgat has published a series of investigative reports for Mada Masr on subjects ranging from Mubarak-era corruption, to Egypt-Gulf relations, to secretive military trials.

In early 2014, Bahgat exposed that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) under Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi had been responsible for releasing dozens of convicted militants from Egypt's jails.

In September 2014, he produced a detailed investigation into the military trial of suspected members of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdes - now known as Islamic State's Sinai Province - in the “Arab Sharkas cell” case.

His most recent investigation, “a coup busted”, looked into the military trial of 26 army officers accused of plotting a coup against the Sisi government. Those convicted included Major Momen Mohamed Saeed Abdel Aty, the brother of General Ragai Saeed, one of the country's most senior generals. The report prominently featured Egypt's military intelligence service.

"Hossam Bahgat is one of Egypt's most internationally and nationally celebrated human rights defenders and investigative journalists,” said Hisham Hellyer, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in DC and the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“Summoning any civilian for interrogation to military intelligence is one thing on its own - summoning Bahgat, and interrogating him for so long, is quite another. Many in Egypt's media and civil rights communities will read that as a particularly strong message - but not an especially new one."

Bahgat's summons comes at a time when the Egyptian government has been targeting dissenters with renewed vigour.

In September, Amr Ali, the head of the April 6 Revolutionary youth movement, one of Egypt's largest opposition political groups, was subject to enforced disappearance by the internal intelligence agency. Hundreds of civilians have been disappeared by Egypt's security services this year.

According to the Commitee to Project Journalists, at least 18 journalists are currently imprisoned in Egypt.

“Despite the increased scrutiny surrounding the Russian plane crash in the Sinai peninsula, Egypt appears to remain impervious to international public opinion and criticism,” Michael Hanna, Egypt analyst and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told Middle East Eye.

“That they proceeded with this interrogation, which would inevitably bring negative attention to the country, exemplifies the way Egypt's government has become totally unconcerned with negative fallout,” he said.