Egypt: Six independent journalists charged with terrorism and allege torture; protests set to erupt in Cairo this weekend

According to The Guardian, six journalists from the Egyptian independent verification and investigation platform Matsadaash were charged with terrorism this week and now face a public protest being organized by their peers this weekend.

The six — Abdallah Qadri, Mohamed Ashraf Abu Emeira, Mohamed Adel, Islam Barakat, Mohamed Mahmoud and Omar Helal — were taken by plainclothes police from their homes and the street, and were formally charged on Sunday and Wednesday of this week, with one charged on Sunday and the remaining five on Wednesday evening. In a statement, the Egyptian authorities accused them of practicing journalism without accreditation and producing false news on behalf of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The real story, however, lies beyond the charges. Through their lawyers, the six described the treatment they say they endured in detention — being blindfolded and handcuffed for days, beaten, forcibly stripped, with some subjected to electric shocks, and threatened with harm to their families. Lobna Darwish, their lawyer from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), said they were forced to read so-called confessions from paper in front of what was described as a "professional film crew," and forced into "repeated takes."

In response to these allegations, Egypt's prosecution service issued a statement on Wednesday evening saying that forensic examinations of three of the journalists who claimed to have been mistreated had found "no injuries or signs of violence." The interior ministry denied all allegations of abuse and torture, characterizing them as "baseless, and an attempt by detainees to evade the charges against them," and reframing the six as "Muslim Brotherhood members working for the organization."

There is a direct clash between the official conclusions and the journalists' accounts: one side cites forensic procedures to establish "no signs of violence," while the other sets out details of electric shocks, forced confessions and threats to relatives. The two accounts yield no ground to each other, and no independent third party has so far stepped in to verify either side.

Hadeer El-Mahdawy, a member of the protest organizing committee, said: "We are shocked by the news of the torture of our six colleagues." She also warned: "We are going through an extremely difficult moment on every front. But we must show that we reject what is happening, deploy every tool to protect what remains of this profession, and defend our colleagues and ourselves."

The weekend protest is not an isolated incident. Journalist Rasha Azab was summoned by the Supreme State Security Prosecution over social media posts criticizing the interior ministry, facing a charge of "using a website to promote ideas inciting terrorist crimes," and was later granted bail. Her lawyer, Mahienour El-Masry, revealed that the prosecution presented Azab with 11 nearly identical complaints from multiple governorates regarding the same post, with similar complaint documents from multiple provinces fragmenting a single act of public expression into multiple prosecutable jurisdictional points.

In a profession marked by low wages and job insecurity, these arrests represent a fresh escalation. The "terrorism" label has been deployed against an independent verification platform, torture allegations have been flatly denied by the state apparatus, and when peers and lawyers publicly voice opposition, the same legal tools are promptly turned on them in turn.