CAIRO: The South Cairo Misdemeanors Court decided Thursday to pronounce the verdict in the case of the Suzanne Tamim press ban trial on Feb. 26.
Five journalists from Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Wafd have been on trial since Dec. 4 for violating the press ban imposed on the Suzanne Tamim murder trial by the reigning judge Al-Mohammedi Qunsua.
Al-Masry Al-Youm editor Magdy El-Galad and reporters Yousri El-Badri and Farouk El-Dessouki were interrogated at the Prosecutor General’s office for five hours for allegedly violating the press ban. Al-Wafd editor Abbas El-Tarabili and journalist Ibrahim Qaraa are also on trial.
The journalists’ defense team is seeking an acquittal because a similar case brought against state-run newspapers was dropped by the Prosecutor General late November.
Lawyer for the defendants Essam Sultan told Daily News Egypt that there was a double standard in the way the two cases had progressed and for this reason the court had to acquit the journalists.
“We cited the decision of the Prosecutor General and his reasons for not putting the state-run newspaper editors on trial and submitted it in court, he said. “The reporting [on the Tamim case] was the same, so the decision to take some newspapers to court and not others proves a double standard.
Sultan added that this way, “the court is now in a bind, and that’s why the verdict was postponed. It’s difficult to convict. In this case, the defendants must be exonerated.
Sultan predicted that if the sentence goes against the defendants, the journalists might receive prison terms and the editors might receive fines, but that they planned to appeal if this happened.
Lawyers Ihab Naguib and Mohammed Shaaban had submitted the complaint to the North Cairo Public Prosecutor’s office accusing the three government newspapers Al Ahram, Al Akhbar and Al Gomhuria, of violating the ban imposed by Qunsua, who had decided that no details of court proceedings could be published, only court decisions.
The case concerns the publishing of the testimony of one of the witnesses, but the reporters have denied the charges, stating that they published the witness testimony from the prosecution’s investigations and additionally from accounts by two lawyers representing Tamim’s father, Abdel-Sattar.
“We printed the testimony of the witness from his questioning by the Prosecutor, not from the details of what happened inside the court room, El-Badri previously told Daily News Egypt.
El-Badri had also accurately predicted that the complaint against the state-run newspapers would not lead to a trial.
“Our case was referred to the South Cairo court, theirs was sent to the North Cairo court. Why the discrepancy? he said.
He also said that he and his colleagues were not legally notified of the pending trial, and had known about it from a statement from the Prosecutor General’s office sent to the state-run papers.
Construction tycoon Hisham Talaat Moustafa is on trial alongside Mohsen Al-Sukkari for the murder of Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim in Dubai last July. After the first session, Qunsua instituted a press ban on the details of the court case.
At a protest outside the court during the first session of the journalists’ trial Dec. 4, head of the freedoms committees in the Journalists’ Syndicate Mohamed Abdel-Quddous said, “The trial of journalists today defaces Egypt’s reputation abroad and shows it as an oppressive and corrupt country to the whole world.
