Egypt Interrogating Netizen for a Blog Comment
On September the 3rd, 2009, Khaled elBalshy, the Editor-In-Chief of the Al-Badeel newspaper, who maintains a personal blog at http://elbalshy.blogspot.com, was interrogated by the Interior Ministry's Internet Crimes department for a comment on one of his blog posts left by an anonymous visitor. The comment was in response to a post published several months ago. The interrogation, which was unofficial, happened after a complaint against Khaled elBalshy for publishing the comment on his blog. And as a reaction elBalshy deleted all the comments on the aforementioned post.
It should be mentioned, that this is the first time that an Egyptian blogger is being interrogated for a comment published on his blog. This is an indication that security services are trying to come-up with new ways to attack and repress bloggers and internet users.
As reported before on GVA, the same case happened in Syria with blogger Rokana Hamour as well as in Malaysia with blogger Nat Tan.