Egypt Arrests More Bloggers 209
2think writes "The BBC is reporting that after bloggers highlighted recent public sexual harassment within view of Egyptian police, the government of Egypt has been arresting bloggers." From the article: "The most recently detained blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil, was detained in Alexandria on 6 November and was charged with disrupting public order, inciting religious hatred and defaming the president. Amnesty International says Mr Amer appeared to have been detained for expressing critical views about Islam and Egypt's al-Azhar religious authorities."
Learn about Egypt (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seems like a trend (Score:5, Informative)
Second: I imagine that the blogger knew that criticizing government officials &/or Islam was a bad career move.
As usual, TFA isn't that informative.
Google News [google.com] will usually lead you to a much better (Reuters) article [reuters.com]
Here's the essentials:
Egyptian police detained an opposition blogger in a chance security check on Sunday, a human rights group said.
Blogger Rami Siyam,
The area is home to the opposition Ghad (Tomorrow) party's headquarters, and security was especially tight in preparation for President Hosni Mubarak's speech to parliament on Sunday.
Police asked the four for identification.... They told Siyam their records showed he faced a court case in Sharkia province, and he would be transferred there for further checks. The other three were released.
It doesn't seem to me that the Egyptian Gov't went out of its way to nab this guy
Constitutional engineering (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How apppropriate (Score:3, Informative)
Why bloggers are being arrested... (Score:5, Informative)
The Egyptian government was embarrassed, but its response was to completely deny the incident and censor its press from reporting it. Hence, the outrage came out in the blogs. Note that this happened almost 4 weeks ago on Oct 24 and it's just NOW starting to come out. The government has also taken the stance that the bloggers are trying to "humiliate" Egypt and Islam by talking about the incidence and that's why they are persecuted. Please read these articles for more information
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/world/africa/15c airo.html [nytimes.com]
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56301& SelectRegion=Middle_East [irinnews.org]
http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/10/30/the-eid-sexua l-harassment-incident/ [sandmonkey.org]
Re:How apppropriate (Score:4, Informative)
Tell that to Mirza Tahir Hussain, who just got released from Death Row in Pakistan for a self defence incident when he was being sexually assaulted at gunpoint by a taxi driver. It took Prince Charles, Tony Blair and many more before them to get him freed, not killed, after being found innocent but then retried under Islamic law.