CAIRO: Police detained Al Jazeera television s Cairo bureau chief, accusing him of spreading false information while reporting the Sinai bombings, the Interior Ministry said on Thursday. An Interior Ministry spokesman said Hussein Abdel Ghani had been taken in for questioning after reporting an explosion in the eastern province of Sharkia on Wednesday, a report the ministry said was false and spread confusion. He said there were incidents in Sharkia and nothing happened. He s spreading confusion, the spokesman said. When he said there was an explosion in Sharkia, leading everyone to ask about it, about something that didn t happen: where did he get that from? he added. Al Jazeera said during its morning bulletin that police seized Hussein Abdel Ghani from his hotel in the budget resort of Dahab, where bomb attacks killed 24 people this week. The prosecutor ordered Hussein s arrest pending investigations into charges of broadcasting false information which the authorities said was aimed at spreading chaos in the country, the popular Arabic channel said on its Web site.
Officials of the Egyptian journalists trade union went to assist at Ghani s interrogation by prosecutors of the state security court after he was brought to Cairo from Dahab. One of them, Gamal Fahmy, told AFP, We consider the arrest of the head of the Al-Jazeera bureau to be an attack on press freedom in Egypt. For years the journalists union has been demanding the abolition of laws restricting press freedom, including the legislation under which Mr. Abdel Ghani faces prosecution. Al Jazeera has been banned from several Arab countries due to its hard-hitting, and sometimes controversial, coverage of events in a region accustomed to state-controlled media. At least two of its correspondents are under arrest. The most prominent is Tayseer Alouni, who was convicted by a Spanish court of allegedly conspiring with Al-Qaeda militants. Agencies
