Egyptian photojournalist released from prison

by Vanessa Alan and Josh Labrecque
edited by Stephanie LeClair

Photojournalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid was released from an Egyptian prison after being kept there for five and a half years, according to the NY Times.

Zeid was arrested in Cairo’s Rabaa al -Adawiya square on August 14th, 2013 while covering a crackdown by security forces on a sit-in by supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi. He was place in the maximum-security Tora Prison, near Cairo, Egypt’s capital, because he had taken pictures during the crackdown.

“Photography is my passion, but I am paying the price for my passion with my life,” said Zeid, “Tora prison is like a cemetery. It is a place where dreams come to die.”

After the crackdown, protests led by supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood filled an area in central Cairo. Security officials cleared out the protests by killing over 800 people.

(Photo: Amr Nabil/ Associated Press)

Zeid was convicted to five years in prison, which he had already served plus a fine. Since he was unable to pay the fine, an extra six months was added onto his sentence which he has served.

Amnesty International, a London-based non-governmental human rights organization, thought that the sentencing of Zeid was “ludicrous.” Naja Bounaim of Amnesty’s North America division said, “As a prisoner of conscience, he should never have been forced to spend a single minute behind bars — let alone five and a half years.”

Since being released and back safe with his family, Zeid will be on probation and must spend every night in a state police station for the next five years.

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There is a crisis of trust in journalism right now. Many Americans say they don’t trust the news media anymore, and poll after poll shows that they want newspapers to be more transparent about how the news is gathered.

This semester the Exchange is asking its reporters to describe what they did to report the facts, in what we’re calling a transparency statement.  We ask our readers to feel free to use the comment boxes at the bottom of each article to call them out when the reporters may not have done enough and to compliment them when you think they’ve done a good job.

For this news brief, I looked on the NY Times since they are a credible and non biased news source. I found this article interesting because it is very relatable to what the US is going through right now with journalists and the statements that Trump claims about many news outlets being ‘fake news’.