CAIRO: Prosecutor General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud summoned officials from three independent newspapers for questioning after they allegedly violated a publishing ban on a bribery case currently under investigation. Al-Masry Al-Youm, Al-Badil and Al-Tareeq ran reports of a bribery case reportedly involving a prominent Egyptian businessman and political figure. Ahmed Shalaby, a reporter at Al-Masry Al-Youm, is among the journalists being interrogated by the prosecution tomorrow. He told Daily News Egypt that two months ago there was an official order from the prosecutor general to the Ministry of Information banning any media from publishing news related to the bribery case, in which lawyer Raafat El Mosalemy is reportedly involved. "During this time we were compiling information about the case but didn't run it because of the ban. About a week ago, I was surprised to find Al-Badil newspaper running news about [the case] and nothing happened, then state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper ran a front page story about the case and nothing happened, so I followed up on the case. I wrote an article about it only to find out later that there is an order for my interrogation, Shalaby said. While Shalaby confirmed that he will be interrogated tomorrow, Khaled Hassan, editor of the crime page at Al-Badil, said they have not received an official summon. "The order was made because of the article we published last week following up on the bribery case, but the interrogations haven't started with the editors and reporters because we haven't received the official order from the Journalists' Syndicate. "The article we published didn't include any subjective comments or analysis on our part, it was stating what was said during the interrogations with [the public figure], explained Hassan. A similar incident occurred last month when opposition newspaper Al-Dostour was pulled from stands for publishing an article about the then-banned story of Suzanne Tamim's murder. Editor-in-chief Ibrahim Eissa told Daily News Egypt at the time that "the paper was pulled from newsstands probably because of the article about the Suzanne Tamim murder case. An official at the department for distributing newspapers had told Reuters, "We received orders to ban the distribution of this specific issue of Al-Dostour after it was already printed and a number of copies were shipped in a train to the south of Egypt Saturday evening.
