A court in Cairo has ordered the closure of the independent Egyptian news site Mada Masr. The court also ordered the site’s editor-in-chief, Lina Attalah, to be detained until she pays a fine of over $50,000. She was convicted on charges of managing an unlicensed website. Mada Masr is “the flagship independent media outlet in Egypt and a pillar of independent media in the region,” says Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Drop Site News, who previously worked at Mada Masr. The independent outlet was founded in 2013 “in the midst of Egypt’s revolution and counterrevolution” and has “managed to survive all of those years in one of the most hostile media environments” in the world. Still, “what happened today is an unprecedented escalation” because Attalah and Mada Masr had never before been referred to trial.
Kouddous adds that the attack on Mada Masr comes less than a month after Egyptian authorities arrested an entire newsroom at the independent fact-checking outlet Matsadaash. They remain behind bars.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.