It has come to Bikyamasr.com's attention that a supposed journalist “Liliane Khalil,” who had volunteered her services as a contributing editor with us for the past few months may not in fact be the person she claims to be. While the details are emerging, a great investigation here highlights a lot of the information available, most unrelated to Bikyamasr.com. For the record, Bikyamasr.com has never met Ms. Khalil, nor have we given her any financial compensation for her articles. What is disturbing is that going back through our correspondence with her, we have now been able to piece together a number of inaccuracies and what we fell could be blatant lying. In her first email to us, asking to write for us, she linked to her tumblr account, which is now inactive. As journalists, we know that very few situations would ever mean taking work down from the web. She claims to have had her email and other accounts hacked by an unknown source, which is the explanation behind the disappearance of this site. We question this after having read the other information regarding her persona. Next red flag that has come up is her claim to be a writer with Ma'an news agency. Searching their site, there is one article by a Lilian Khalil, the same article that had been originally linked to us via her tumblr account and was also picked up by The New York Times. She also claims to have been a strategist for the Mohamed ElBaradei campaign as she was attempting to get an interview with him. The interview never came, and when asked about the meeting, she avoided it, moving on to saying she was interviewing Hanan Ashrawi of the Palestinian Authority. We have not seen an interview with her on that either. (We have emailed the Baradei people and will update when we hear back) There are numerous apparent lies or misleading information that she has delivered to us in recent times and upon reading through the emails, which we are more than willing to share to concerned parties, it appears that she was attempting to get me, as Editor of Bikyamasr.com, to go to Bahrain to do the bidding of the government there. She said it would be to do a “report” on the Bahraini rulers “perspective” that has “been ignored by media.” I ultimately decided not to go on the supposedly “all-paid” expense trip. The Bahraini government does, however, still send “media notices” to Bikyamasr.com on the “developments” in the country. From what we have heard from others, the reality is that she has made a living on someone's dime for a while now, and has attempted to use her identity as a “journalist” to create positive feedback for some entity, most likely the Bahraini government. From what I have been able to gather, all correspondence from her has been odd. She even had an @bikyamasr.com email address she requested so she could obtain an interview with some top US officials. These never arrived. It is an unfortunate incident that we at Bikyamasr.com do not in any way condone and unless Liliane Khalil can prove her existence, in person, all correspondence with her will be severed completely. There are too many loopholes in the correspondence and the “disappearing” from one moment to the next not to question the authenticity of who she says she is. Bikyamasr.com strives to deliver honest and as unbiased news to our readers and if we have been let on by someone in our organization who claimed to be someone she is not, we sincerely apologize for this and will do our utmost to avoid any similar situations. Liliane Khalil has obviously used a number of people and organizations in recent years and this is a sad and unethical attempt to push an agenda. BM
