Egypt court orders Mada Masr closed and fines editor Lina Attalah three million pounds


Close portrait of Lina Attalah, editor in chief of Mada Masr, against a green background

[file photo] Lina Attalah, editor in chief of Mada Masr, in an image the outlet posted on October 27, 2026 after her release. Photo: Mada Masr via X

An Egyptian court has ordered the closure of the independent news site Mada Masr and fined its editor, Lina Attalah, three million Egyptian pounds, the maximum penalty for running a website without a license.

The ninth circuit of the New Cairo Misdemeanor Court, led by Judge Mohamed Mubarak, issued the ruling on Tuesday at the first hearing in the case. It also ordered the confiscation of the outlet's equipment and devices, Mada Masr reported. The fine is worth about 54,000 U.S. dollars, according to Amnesty International.

Security officers took Attalah into custody inside the courtroom as soon as the verdict was read. For several hours her lawyers and colleagues did not know where she was. Mada Masr paid the fine in full, and she was released about seven hours after her arrest, the outlet said.

Then came a second shock. During the release procedures, Attalah learned that a court had sentenced her in absentia in 2024 to one year in prison on charges of publishing false news and running an unlicensed website. Her lawyers have filed a challenge, and a retrial hearing is set for November 11, Mada Masr said. Her lead lawyer, Hassan el-Azhary, said Mada Masr would appeal the closure order, AP reported.

The account of the hearing given by Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, who attended, describes a trial that moved fast and left the defense out. According to Bahgat, the judge refused requests by Attalah's eight lawyers for time to study the case file, to submit documents and to call witnesses. After a break, he ordered the courtroom cleared of everyone except Attalah and her lawyers, and the room filled with plainclothes officers, including an officer of the National Security Agency, Bahgat said.

When the defense refused to make its final plea until its requests were answered, the judge called in a lawyer none of them knew and appointed him to defend Attalah. "In a move that astonished all those present," Bahgat said, the defense team shouted its objection. Attalah herself said she did not accept the appointed lawyer, but the judge refused to record her objection, according to Bahgat. "In an even more shocking move," he said, the judge began to write down requests on behalf of the appointed lawyer before the lawyer had said a word, and then read out the conviction. Security personnel then lifted Attalah off the ground and carried her out of the room, Mada Masr reported.

Mada Masr, which publishes in Arabic and English, has been blocked inside Egypt since 2017. It says it has applied for a license since 2018 and has never received an answer. In a statement in Arabic, the outlet said it would keep dealing with the ruling and its consequences "through the law, as is our custom," while rights groups, journalists and political parties call for the verdict to be cancelled.

The outlet also noted that on the same day, the Supreme State Security Prosecution in New Cairo renewed for 15 days the detention of six journalists from the fact checking platform Matsada2sh, who were arrested earlier this month. Mada Masr said the journalists and their lawyers complained about the conditions of their detention.

The reaction from press freedom groups was strong. Reporters Without Borders called the ruling "scandalous" in a French language post and demanded that the sentence be cancelled. Amnesty International said the decision "represents a crushing blow to press freedom in Egypt and marks a dark day for independent journalism in the country," and called on the authorities to overturn it. "If Egypt can put in custody one of its most respected editors and shut down her newsroom, no independent journalist in the country is safe," said Sara Qudah, regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, according to the BBC. U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen called the charges baseless and said "journalism is not a crime," DW reported.

Inside Egypt, the head of the Journalists Syndicate said the union would "take every legal and union path to defend our right to media worthy of us," according to the Egyptian outlet Al Mashhad. The syndicate member and journalist Iman Ouf said she had been barred from entering the courtroom, the news site Mazid reported. Mada Masr said representatives of the syndicate were kept out of the hearing.

Not everyone sympathized. The Egyptian commentator Abbass Elmohandes wrote on X that the syndicate was backing "suspicious, funded sites," accusing Mada Masr of spreading lies and incitement and saying the law would be applied to violators. He offered no evidence.

The Egyptian Government had not publicly commented on the case by Wednesday morning.

Sources

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