The military police arrested Shaimaa Khalil, a journalist working with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo on Monday evening, said the BBC. Khalil was arrested while she was covering the breakup of the Tahrir Square sit-in by military police backed by Central Security Forces.
The BBC expressed its concern at the arrest and said it was working for her release. Minutes before her arrest, Khalil sent a Tweet on social networking site Twitter saying, “Someone warned me that they are arresting anyone taking pictures.”
BBC journalist and Khalil’s husband Ahmed Zaki told Al-Masry Al-Youm that his wife “called him on Tuesday morning and told him she was at the military prosecution and that she would be transferred to an unknown destination.”
Zaki went on to say that military sources denied their knowledge of his wife’s arrest, saying, “There are no journalists among those arrested.”
Diplomatic communications are said to be underway between the Egyptian Embassy in London, the British Embassy in Cairo and the Foreign Ministry in an attempt to determine Khalil’s whereabouts.
Translated from the Arabic Edition
