Journalists Arrested in Egypt
The New York Times reports:
Many journalists covering the protests in Egypt were detained by the government and attacked on Thursday, and representatives of human rights groups were also a target.
Egyptian security police raided the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, where many nongovernmental organizations operate, according to witnesses in Cairo. The police ordered people at the center to lie on the floor and disabled their mobile phones, the witnesses said. Two people were being interrogated.
The Egyptian state news agency asked foreign reporters and crews to move out of all the hotels near Tahrir Square in Cairo, the focal point of antigovernment protests, on Thursday.
Near the square, a group of journalists was stopped in their car on Thursday by a gang of men with knives, and turned over to military police, who held them briefly.
The Committee to Protect Journalists was investigating at least 10 cases of reporters being detained. According to the group, the government told the journalists that they were not being arrested, but rather were being taken into “protective custody.” Two reporters working for The New York Times were released on Thursday after being detained overnight in Cairo.
The United States protested the actions against reporters.
“There is a concerted campaign to intimidate international journalists in Cairo and interfere with their reporting,” Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs, said Thursday morning in a statement via Twitter. “We condemn such actions."
The television channel Al Arabiya broadcast a plea to the Egyptian army to intervene after its headquarters in Cairo came under sustained attack from pro-Mubarak demonstrators. “They destroyed some equipment outside the building, and they said they would come in and destroy everything,” said Nakhle El Hage, the channel’s news director, in a telephone interview from Dubai. He said the army responded by deploying more soldiers to secure the building.
“The crews have never been as scared as they are now,” Mr. El Hage said. “I have correspondents who covered Lebanon and Gaza, but this is a different experience.”
Two employees of Al Jazeera, another news network, were dragged out of their car on the road from the airport to central Cairo and were detained. The network’s Web site appeared to be out of service for much of the morning, in Egypt as well as in the United States.
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