Egyptian Food Protest Bloggers Update
By Curt on Apr 22, 2008 in Kareem El Beheiri, Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed, Mahamed El Sharkawi, Imprisoned bloggers, Egypt
Update:
RSF now reports that Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed has also been released.
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From RSF:
Mahamed El Sharkawi, a blogger who was arrested on 5 April while distributing leaflets urging Cairo residents to go on strike in support of the 6 April protest against food price hikes, was released yesterday from a prison in the Cairo district of Marg where he had been on strike for the past four days. Sharkawi heads the Cairo-based publishing house Malameh, which was raided by a moral decency police unit on 16 April for publishing a comic book called “Metro” written in vernacular Arabic. Copies of the book were seized on the grounds that it harmed “public manners.”
Fellow blogger Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed, who launched the “6 April” group on the social networking website Facebook, is still detained although the prosecutor general ordered her release on 17 April. Her group had more than 65,000 members.
A third blogger, Kareem El Beheiri, who was one of the workers arrested during protests in Mahalla (north of Cairo) on 7 April, is also still held. Well-known because of his blog, he has been fired from his job in a Mahalla textile plant without any grounds being given.
