CAIRO (AP) – Egypt has released seven people, including a journalist and a researcher serving prison sentences on terror-related charges, the latest steps by the government to reach out to the opposition amid a grinding economic crisis.
Saturday’s freeing of journalist Hisham Fouad and anthropology researcher Ahmed Samir came a day after el-Sissi pardoned them, along with five others, according to state-run media.
The two were released from the Tora prison complex in Cairo and images shared online showed them hugging families and friends outside the prison.
Fouad was arrested along with several other activists in June 2019, shortly after the group met with political parties and opposition lawmakers trying to hash out how to run in the 2020 parliamentary elections. Among the detained were Hossam Monis and Zyad el-Elaimy, prominent activists in the country’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising.
They were convicted last year of conspiring to commit crimes with an outlawed group, a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt has banned as a terrorist organization. Fouda and Monis were sentenced to four years in prison each while el-Elaimy received a five-year sentence. Monis was released in a presidential pardon in April.
El-Elaimy’s mother, Ekram Yousef, joined Fouad’s family while they awaited his release outside the prison. Yousef, who carried a bouquet of flowers for Fouad, later posted on Facebook that he told her he felt guilty that he was free while her son was still in prison.
Samir, who is doing his master’s in anthropology at the Vienna-based Central European University, was detained in February 2021 on charges of disseminating false news. His four-year sentence was lowered to three years in a retrial earlier this year.