Pending appeal

Ibrahim Eissa, editor-in-chief of Al-Dostour, is sentenced to six months in prison with hard labour for reporting rumours concerning President Mubarak's health. Shaden Shehab was in court

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The Boulaq misdemeanours yesterday found Ibrahim Eissa, the editor-in-chief of Al-Dostour, guilty of disseminating false rumours about President Hosni Mubarak's health that constituted an incitement to unrest. The case, which started on 1 November, ended with Eissa being sentenced to six months in prison with hard labour. He is currently on bail, set at LE200, and has 10 days to appeal the sentence.

In August 2007 rumours began to circulate that President Mubarak, 79, was seriously ill. The stories appear to have originated on the Internet, transmitted via SMS messages, before eventually being picked up by Al-Dostour. The rumours prompted Mubarak to make an unannounced public appearance in a bid to dispel them.

Many expected Eissa to be tried before a state security court where there is no right of appeal. The trial eventually took place in a civil court following an outcry from journalists and international human rights organisations.

At 10am, presiding Judge Sherif Kamel took the bench to announce the ruling, dismissing seven suits brought against Eissa by private citizens and concentrating instead on the case brought by the state security prosecution since Eissa's, the judge said, "was a crime against the state".

More than a dozen armoured vehicles surrounded Al-Tagammu Al-Khames, the court complex on the outskirts of Cairo. Access was blocked by state security personnel, plain clothes security men and senior police officers. Neither Eissa nor his lawyers appeared in court, which in the end was transformed into a media zone, with journalists and broadcasters almost outnumbering the security men.

During the case, both the deputy of Central Bank of Egypt and the chair of the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange had appeared alongside other economic experts as witnesses for the prosecution, which argued that the rumours Eissa had helped disseminate had "caused foreign investors to withdraw more than $350 million from the stock exchange".

Judge Kamel said that Eissa had been found guilty of the "dangerous crime" of publishing false information, and it was immaterial whether or not his newspaper had instigated the rumours or acted as a conduit for their spread. The court, he told reporters, judged Eissa guilty of publishing information that he knew to be false in a way that could incite panic and unrest. He further explained that Article 188 of the penal code makes the publishing of false information a crime whether it incites unrest or not.

He said the fact that Eissa had continued to publish articles on the president's health after Mubarak appeared on TV during an unscheduled visit to an industrial zone was evidence of ill-intention. It would be up to Eissa, in any appeal, to show this was not the case.

Eissa, who broke taboos by publishing stories critical of Mubarak and his family, was one of four editors sentenced last September to one year in jail and fined LE20,000 for defaming leading members of the NDP. In that case, too, the editors avoided detention by paying bail pending an appeal.

In September last year seven journalists were sentenced to up to two years in prison on charges ranging from misquoting the justice minister to spreading rumours about the health of the president. The trials prompted 23 papers to suspend publication for a day in protest.

The weekly Al-Dostour was launched in 1995. It was soon closed down by the authorities, only to be relaunched in 2005.