More Attacks and Detentions for Journalists in Cairo

The Committee to Protect Journalists documented eight new detentions and nearly a dozen new attacks, and also reported on Friday the first case of a reporter killed while covering the unrest in Egypt.

The reporter, Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud, worked for a state-owned newspaper, Al-Ta’awun, and was hit by sniper fire on Jan. 28 while filming near Tahrir Square in Cairo, according to the group. He died from his wounds on Friday.

The new attacks on journalists did not appear as widespread on Friday as they were a day before, when a coordinated campaign of media intimidation hit its peak. But several newsrooms were forced to shut down and, in the case of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Cairo office, set on fire.

The Muslim Brotherhood said Friday that security forces had raided the office of its official news Web site and arrested several journalists, according to Muhammad Abdel Qodous, a member of the group and a free speech advocate.

Al Hurra, an American-financed television station, said a group of men stormed its Cairo office and threatened to kill to on-air journalists if they did not flee, according to an e-mail sent by the station to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Al Jazeera said in a statement that one of its offices had been “burned along with the equipment inside it” by a “gang of thugs.”

But the attack would not stop the network from broadcasting, said Mostefa Souag, the director of news for Al Jazeera Arabic, because the channel has been operating from other locations since early this week when police officials began preventing employees from entering the bureau. A nearby office for Al Jazeera English, the sister channel, was not affected.

Indeed, as over 100,000 protesters surged into Tahrir Square, the epicenter of antigovernment demonstrations that began last week, broadcasters trained their live cameras on the gathering throngs after having been largely prevented from doing so on Thursday.

Egyptian state television also began showing footage of the peaceful antigovernment protests in Tahrir Square for the first time. The images, shot from a distance, obscured much of the crowd and the on-air commentator at one point significantly undercounted the crowd, saying only a few thousand protesters, both for and against President Hosni Mubarak, had shown up.

Al Arabiya, whose journalists were chased from their Cairo office by pro-Mubarak demonstrators on Thursday, reported that the Egyptian Army had been told Friday to step in to protect foreign journalists. Even so, there were scattered reports of journalists being harassed and threatened on the street by groups of men. One reported being robbed at knifepoint by a group of men.

“There were some incidents today, but certainly nothing like we’ve seen,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. Most of the large groups who roamed the streets on Thursday attacking journalists, human rights activists and other foreigners seemed to have disappeared on Friday, he said. “It’s the clearest evidence yet that the violence we saw yesterday was an orchestrated event by pro-Mubarak supporters.”

Several researchers for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and two journalists, who were detained after security police raided the Hisham Mubarak Law Center in Cairo on Thursday, were released late on Friday, Amnesty International said. But as many as two dozen Egyptians, including some of the country’s most prominent human rights advocates, were still being held by the government.

“We’ve now got firm information as to where they’re being detained,” said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East program, but “no official confirmation of their arrest.”

On Thursday, it seemed that no news organization was exempt from the widespread campaign of media intimidation. Whether from Western or Arab media, television networks or wire services, newspapers or photo syndicates, journalists were chased through the streets and had their equipment stolen or smashed. Some were beaten so badly that they required hospital treatment.

Arab reporters, lacking some of the protections provided by Western media organizations, are especially vulnerable to violence. In addition to the Egyptian reporter who was killed by gunfire, a reporter for Al Arabiya was beaten by a group of pro-Mubarak demonstrators on Wednesday. His injuries were significant enough that he remained in the hospital, though his condition was not critical, said Nakhle el-Hage, the network’s director of news.

The intimidation and violence against reporters were condemned at the highest levels of the United States government. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, rebuked the Mubarak government and its supporters, calling the harassment “completely and totally unacceptable.” Speaking to reporters traveling with President Obama, he said that “any journalist that has been detained should be released immediately.”