For the first time in Egypt, a blogger is to be sent to a military court because of his writing online. Ahmad Mostafa (student) wrote on his blog Maza Asabak ya Watan [1] (What Weent Wrong With You oh My country?!) about a student from the War School, who was expelled and his dad asked to sign a statement saying: “my son was not able to adapt to the military life“.
According to Mostafa's blog post [2], which only quoted members of the expelled student's family, a rich man who wanted to have his son join the school but couldn't find a place for him, maneuvered for this place and then succeeded to replace his son with the expelled Mostafa.
The young blogger wrote about the incident a year ago on under the title: ‘The School War's Scandel“. But a month ago he received an alert from the security regarding that post, right before a visit paid by the president Hosni Mubarak's to Kafr El-Sheikh governorate, where Mostafa lives and studies. On 25th February he was arrested, while was in his way to the university.
The Association of Freedom of Thinking and Expression condemned [3] the arrest and listed the accusation of Mostafa, which brought him to a military court:
He was transferred to the military attorney who decided to keep him in custody for 4 days in order to resume the investigation, and to send him to the military court in Cairo on February 28th, 2010, as he is accused of:
- defaming the Egyptian armed forces.
- shaking the trust of people on the armed forces.
- publishing false news.
The Egyptian blogosphere was abuzz by the news, especially that the young blogger didn't write a word about “the Egyptian armed forces“, Zeinobia [4] blogged:
I respect the army very much and I think that this incident is very dangerous especially that from I understand from Mohamed Adel's post about the matter the military intelligence is involved in the matter. From a legal point of view Mustafa should not be prosecuted in front of a military court. From a logic point of view he should not be prosecuted at all because he did not breach any military secrets
Reading again his blog post, the Egyptian blogger Cocy [5] found a comment [6], published on January 26th by a reader called ‘Tamer’, threatening Mostafa for the aforementioned post.
Twitter was the news exchange tool for the arrested blogger, Mohamed Adel tweeted [7] the news, and has been updating the tweeps on him.