Egyptian court orders release on bail of Al-Jazeera journalists

Baher Mohamed, left, and Mohamed Fahmy, who have been granted bail from prison in Egypt. Their colleague Peter Greste, right, was released earlier this month. Photograph: Heba Elkholy/AP

A Cairo court has ordered the release of the al-Jazeera English journalists Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed on bail after more than 400 days in jail.

The court did not dismiss the case against them.

Judge Hassan Farid said the next hearing would be on 23 February. Canadian Fahmy was released on 250,000 Egyptian pound (£21,000) bail. Mohamed, an Egyptian, was released with no bail costs.

Fahmy and Mohamed were imprisoned in June alongside a third colleague, Australian Peter Greste, who was released last week.

An al-Jazeera spokesman said:

 

“Bail is a small step in the right direction, and allows Baher and Mohamed to spend time with their families after 411 days apart. The focus though is still on the court reaching the correct verdict at the next hearing by dismissing this absurd case and releasing both these fine journalists unconditionally.”

The three journalists were first arrested in December 2013, and sentenced to several years in jail in June 2014 on charges of terrorism and spreading false news, alongside several students they had never met before the case.

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Internationally, their fate was seen as an infringement of the right to free speech. Inside Egypt, government supporters saw them as a legitimate target, due to the support that al-Jazeera English’s Arabic sister channels gave for the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned opposition group.

In January their convictions were quashed and their case was sent to a retrial by a judge who on Tuesday issued a damning appraisal of the original trial.

The initial trial failed to provide conclusive evidence that the defendants had helped the banned Muslim Brotherhood or promoted the group in the media, wrote Judge Anwar Gabry, the deputy head of the court of cassation, Egypt’s highest court of appeal.

Gabry said that the initial trial also failed to investigate claims that the defendants had produced testimony under duress, and as a result “the court of cassation is unable to show how right or wrong the verdict is”. His judgment also questioned whether the journalists should have been accused of terrorism, since their alleged crimes were not violent.

Peter Greste, the Australian ex-BBC correspondent, was deported to Australia last week under the terms of a recently-enacted presidential decree that allows foreign detainees to continue their detention in their home countries. Fahmy had given up his Egyptian citizenship to qualify for deportation to Canada.