Egypt’s Interior Ministry Accidentally Releases Memos on Restricting News Media

Local Editor

Egypt's Interior Ministry, already under fire over accusations of police brutality and other abuses, heaped new woes onto itself on Tuesday when its press office published, apparently by accident, confidential guidelines that aim to counter a growing tide of news media criticism.

Memos sent to journalists from the ministry's official email account contained suggestions about how to counter a "vicious" news media campaign that had been triggered by the arrest of two reporters at the journalists' union headquarters in downtown Cairo late Sunday. One document proposed a rule to stop all coverage related to Giulio Regeni, the Italian graduate student whose brutalized body was found on a Cairo roadside in February.

The accidental leaks provide a rare glimpse into the mind-set and internal working of the notoriously opaque Egyptian government at a time when President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is under intense scrutiny at home and abroad. The Regeni killing had plunged relations with Italy into crisis, while the police arrested dozens of people on April 25 during a rare public protest over the transfer of two Egyptian islands to Saudi Arabia.

Sisi hopes to counter the country's continuing economic crisis, which has seen a sharp decline in the value of the Egyptian currency, with large cash infusions from allied countries in the Persian Gulf like Qatar. Yet hardly a week goes by when his once-unchallenged popularity is not tested by a new crisis.

This week, it is the country's journalists, who have engaged in an open-ended sit-in at the headquarters of the journalists' union where Sunday's arrests took place. One reporter who witnessed Sunday's raid said that plainclothes police officers "barged into the building and beat up one of the guards."

Journalists had called for the dismissal of the interior minister, Maj. Gen. Magdi Abdel-Ghaffar, who insists he has done nothing wrong. But judging by the leaked media guidance, his ministry believes it needs to show a strong hand to stop the protests from growing.

The ministry "cannot backtrack", one of two memos says. "Backtracking means a mistake was made." Instead, it says, the police should seek to undermine the credibility of the journalists' union by deploying retired police generals to the country's influential, and mostly pro-Sisi, television programs, to "explain the ministry's point of view."

The memos proposed assigning more staff members to monitor news websites around the clock.

"The leak shows how they deal with problems, and that they don't want to be held accountable," said Mahmoud Elmamlouk, editor in chief of Innfrad, a local news website. He said the raid on Sunday represented a "dangerous escalation from the interior, a new way of dealing with journalists."

Interior Ministry officials blamed a "technical malfunction" for the leak and said that they would be setting up a new email address. They refused to comment on the contents of the leak.

The two journalists who were arrested work for a website that has covered police actions against activists and journalists. The two men were accused of illegal possession of weapons, and they are being held for questioning for 15 days.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team