CAIRO: Salah El-Deen Hafez, a prominent Egyptian writer who spent the later part of his journalism career advocating press freedom, has died. He was 70.
The state-owned Middle East News Agency says Hafez died Sunday. It didn t give a cause of death.
During his busy career, Hafez wrote 12 books. In his last, titled Forbidden Politics and Banned Journalism, he criticized a lack of freedoms in Egypt.
Hafez received a journalism degree from Cairo University in 1960 and later joined Egypt s leading daily, Al-Ahram, to become its managing editor.
In 1968 he became secretary-general of Egypt s Journalists Syndicate and later held the same post in the Arab Journalists Union.
In the 1990s, he helped found the Arab Human Rights Organization. -AP
