Egyptian editor faces trial after hours of questioning

The editor-in-chief of one of Egypt’s last independent news outlets, Mada Masr, will stand trial after prosecutors questioned her for more than six hours, her lawyer said early Thursday.

The Supreme State Prosecution referred Mada Masr’s Lina Attalah to trial on Thursday on a charge of establishing and managing a website without a license. She was also questioned on a charge of publishing false news, but that charge was not included in her court referral, according to Mada Masr’s lawyer, Hassan al-Azhari.

She was released Wednesday evening on bail of 100,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,800), but if convicted, she faces a fine of one to three million Egyptian pounds ($18,000 to $54,000), al-Azhari said.

Under Egyptian media law, the court may also order the outlet closed and its equipment confiscated. Al-Azhari called the speed of the referral, which came just hours after the questioning ended, “unjustified urgency.”

Attalah is due in court on Oct. 27.

Attalah founded Mada Masr in 2013, and its investigative reporting has made it a frequent target of authorities. The site has been blocked in Egypt since 2017. Time magazine named Attalah one of its 100 most influential people in 2020.

The case file included a Mada Masr report published earlier this month in which lawyers described a wave of protests at several prisons and a harsh security response, al-Azhari said. The protests followed parliament’s decision to delay Egypt’s new criminal procedures law by a year.

Mada Masr said it has applied for a license several times since 2018. It says the Supreme Media Regulatory Council never responded and that it learned of the council’s rejection from prosecutors in 2022. The outlet challenged that decision in court. Its latest application has been pending since 2023, Mada Masr said.

The case is the sixth against Mada Masr and its journalists in six years. It comes less than a month after security forces arrested the entire six-person newsroom of Matsadaash, an independent fact-checking and investigative platform, in raids across the country on Sept. 28 and 29. Their families and lawyers did not know where they were for days.

The six remain in pre-trial detention on charges including joining a terrorist group and spreading false news, which they deny. Their detention was renewed for 15 days on Oct. 13.

This week, Mada Masr and seven other Egyptian and Arab outlets launched a temporary joint fact-checking newsroom in solidarity with the detained journalists.

Egypt ranks 169th of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index.