No one talks about the death of Lebanese pop singer Susan Tamim and the press has not even one word about Mohsen el-Sukary, the first defendant in the case, or Hisham Talaat Mustafa, the second defendant, although the accident had once made the headlines of all papers. The reason behind not writing about this accident nowadays may attributed to the fact that there a gag order on this accident. It may be also because new news and incidents came to cover it. However, the main point is that Al-Masry Al-Youm has exclusively published a copy of the contract signed between the second defendant and the Ministry of Housing under former minister Ibrahim Suleiman with regard to the project of "Madinati". After the daily published details of this strange contract, lawyer Farid El-Deeb filed a report accusing the newspaper of violating the gag order. Anyone following events will immediately discover that the report was tantamount to a punishment for Al-Masry Al-Youm because it published the terms of the strange contract will question marks around it.
The gag order was based on the fact that publishing more news on the accident would necessarily affect public opinion and, in turn, the judge who would consider the case. Although such an analysis is logical in form, it lacks logic in content because if public opinion would be affected by what would be published by the press, the judge is not supposed to be influenced by public opinion. The judge, in any case, builds his decision on documents and evidence rather than on what is said by people, as evidenced by the court ruling in the issue of the famous sunken ferry, as the verdict had nothing to do with what had been said by public opinion, not because the judge, God forbid, intended to do this, but because he built his decision on documents he had. He has not been affected by what was said around him although no gag order was issued, and people were speaking everywhere. If newspapers have stopped publishing in compliance with the order, advertisements of Hisham Talaat Mostafa about his real estate projects are still published in the press and other media, which would necessarily affect public opinion. "The builders of the Future" group, which is owned by the second defendant, still makes advertisements in papers and on TV, and nobody said that this would necessarily affect public opinion. Indeed, this is a clear and blatant violation against the order and would also have a negative impact on the judge! It is astonishing that this time the breach is not by the media, but is caused by the second defendant, which is a main party in the case!
