A Cairo court on Tuesday ordered the closure of news outlet Mada Masr and convicted its editor-in-chief Lina Attalah of managing an unlicensed website. The ruling sparked outrage among press freedom advocates, who warned it marked a significant escalation in ongoing attacks against independent media in Egypt. 

Attalah was briefly detained and ordered to pay the maximum penalty of 3 million Egyptian pounds, equivalent to more than $50,000, according to Mada Masr. Upon her release, Attalah learned a one-year prison sentence was issued against her in absentia in 2024 on separate charges of publishing false news and operating an unlicensed website. Her lawyers challenged the ruling, and a retrial is scheduled for Nov. 11, Mada Masr reported.

“If Egypt can put in custody one of its most respected editors and shut down her newsroom, no independent journalist in the country is safe,” Sara Qudah, regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a public statement.

  • Recommended reading

Attalah founded Mada Masr in 2013 and authorities blocked its website in Egypt four years later during a crackdown on more than a dozen sites, including Al Jazeera. Even so, the newsroom has spent more than a decade reporting on government corruption and human rights violations in the country, and took part in ICIJ’s 2021 Pandora Papers investigation. Most recently, the outlet covered protests spreading through Egypt’s prisons.

The court hearing on Tuesday was marred with legal controversies. Human rights and press freedom advocates reported that the court rejected requests from Attalah’s lawyers to review the case file and appointed Attalah a new attorney despite the presence of her legal team. The court ruled that Mada Masr’s site had been operating without a license, despite the outlet’s repeated, unanswered requests to authorities for a license since 2018, according to Amnesty International. 

Timothy E. Kaldas, deputy director of the Washington-based think tank Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, called the court’s decision “unprecedented on multiple fronts.” Mada Masr has not been referred to trial previously — or convicted of any crime — and an Egyptian court has not ordered the closure of a news site since 2013. “It’s an alarming escalation,” he told ICIJ. 

If Egypt can put in custody one of its most respected editors and shut down her newsroom, no independent journalist in the country is safe.

— Sara Qudah, regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists

The Mada Masr closure comes just one month after authorities detained the entire newsroom of the Egyptian fact-checking website Matsadaash, accusing the journalists of associating with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Mada Masr had rallied behind the Matsadaash newsroom and reported that the staff was forced to read false confessions and subjected to torture. On the same day as Attalah’s hearing, Egypt’s Supreme State Security Prosecution extended the journalists’ pretrial detention for another 15 days without providing new evidence. In September, ICIJ joined more than 40 organizations worldwide to call for their release.

The recent flurry of cases signifies a growing hostility toward independent media in a country that is already one of the world’s top jailers of journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 25 journalists are currently behind bars in Egypt, the highest number since 2021. Egypt ranks 169 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.

“We’re in uncharted territory in terms of these escalations,” Kaldas said. 

He warned that the attack on Mada Masr, one of Egypt’s most prominent independent news outlets, without pushback could encourage the government “to take out virtually all the independent media that remains in the country and, in so doing, denying the Egyptian public access to any kind of credible information.”