The Egyptian police have arrested six journalists from a fact-checking news outlet, accusing the platform of spreading disinformation on behalf of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
The Interior Ministry on Thursday accused the outlet, Matsaddash, a disinformation monitor and investigative journalism platform, of working with the Brotherhood to spread fabrications. Egypt has designated the group as a terrorist organization.
Matsaddash, which means “Don’t Believe It” in Arabic, has denied the accusations and published a fact-check to debunk each of the government’s claims.
The journalists, who make up the platform’s entire reporting team, were arrested on Monday and Tuesday, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which said it was providing them with legal assistance.
The whereabouts of the six reporters — Abu Emeira, Abdallah Qadry, Islam Barakat, Omar Helal, Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel — are unknown, the rights group said.
“The disappeared Matsaddash journalists are well known across the region, and their work for the platform is recognized for its professionalism and accuracy,” the group said in a statement.
The Brotherhood, an Islamist group that has promoted a religious revival in the Muslim world, is banned in several Arab states besides Egypt, including Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Opponents accuse the group of religious extremism, while its supporters say the Brotherhood’s call for democratic representation is a challenge to authoritarian power.
The Egyptian Interior Ministry said security officials had been monitoring the Brotherhood’s plans to “undermine the state of stability through fabricating lies and spreading rumors” when it “detected” that the Matsaddash website was “broadcasting false news and distorting facts.”
The ministry said an investigation showed that Matsaddash was part of the Brotherhood’s media committee and that it was run and funded from outside Egypt.
It also linked the group to Abdelrahman Mansour, a rights activist who now lives abroad and was one of the youth leaders of the Arab Spring, the wave of pro-democracy uprisings that swept across the Middle East in 2011. The ministry described him as a “fugitive” who worked with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The police began rounding up the journalists late on Monday night. Officers fanned out across regions, raiding reporters’ homes in Port Said and Gharbiya, in northern Egypt, and arresting them without a warrant, the rights group said. Plainclothes security officers confiscated electronic devices belonging to the journalists and to any relatives living with them. Two more journalists were arrested on a Cairo street.
The news site rebutted the government’s claims about the journalists. In a pointed article, it said that no journalists working at Matsaddash had any links to the Muslim Brotherhood, adding that all its staff live and work in Egypt. Journalists working for the site, which was founded in 2018, receive no foreign funding, and their salaries and contracts are vetted and approved by Egyptian banks, the outlet said.
It also said that the police had previously investigated three of the six journalists and found no evidence or links to political parties or international interest groups.
“Leveling these accusations without presenting any evidence not only harms the reputation of Matsaddash, but also impugns the professionalism of Egyptian journalists operating publicly,” the news organization said in its statement.
Matsaddash also pointed to its recent reporting in which it had published a video debunking claims made by news outlets that are affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood. Last week, the site reported on what it described as fake news that undermined Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The Interior Ministry has not responded to the site’s article or to calls from rights groups to release the journalists.
Even before this week’s arrest of the six reporters, Egypt had one of the highest numbers of detained journalists, with 19 in custody, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international nonprofit organization.
Matsaddash has endured “smear campaigns intended to silence its journalism work,” the committee said in a statement this week.
In August 2023, security officials detained one of Matsaddash’s editors, holding him for 48 hours without a warrant before releasing him, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights said.
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