BBC lost credibility as media source: Journalists Syndicate

CAIRO – 10 March 2018: Head of the Journalists Syndicate Abdel Mohsen Salama said on Friday that BBC lost its credibility as media source after its false report on alleged enforced disappearance cases in Egypt.

Salama stressed the need to continue the Egyptian boycott to BBC as long as it ignored to apologize for its “disastrous mistake”.

The head of the State Information Service (SIS) Diaa Rashwan received at his office on Tuesday BBC Cairo bureau chief Safaa Faisal to hand her SIS’s official objection to BBC’s controversial report, published on February 24 under the title “The Shadow over Egypt”.

Rashwan said during the meeting that the SIS insists to receive an official apology from BBC network over the controversial report which alleged that Egypt’s security apparatuses participate in the enforced disappearance of Egyptian citizens.

Zubeida Ibrahim, who was mistakenly reported by BBC to be enforced disappeared, was hosted on a talk show aired on ON E on February 26, exposing the unprofessional reporting and allegations made by the English network on the situation in Egypt.

Ibrahim revealed that she has been married for a year, has a son named Hamza and lives in the Faisal neighborhood. Ibrahim told Adeeb that she has not been talking to her mother for a year; the young woman chose not to reveal the reason behind her disagreement with her mother.

She added that she was jailed once for four months with her mother for joining a pro-Muslim Brotherhood protest. However, she denied being tortured when she was jailed in El Qanater prison.


Zubeida Ibrahim and her family during the Interview with Amr Adeeb- Photo taken from the interview

The young woman said that her mother's false statements to BBC were given because the mother did not know her daughter’s whereabouts. Ibrahim asked her mother to forgive her and to accept to meet her as soon as possible. Ibrahim revealed that she did not know anything about the BBC’s controversial report, as she does not follow the news.

Ibrahim’s husband stated that he married her on March 13, 2017, without her family’s consent. He showed the marriage document, which dates back to March 2017, unlike the BBC allegations. BBC claimed that Ibrahim disappeared on April 8, 2017.

Ibrahim said that she had joined the Muslim Brotherhood’s Al Nahda sit-in back in 2013 for 10 days, along with her mother. During the interview, both women admitted their previous connection with the Muslim Brotherhood – a connection they later chose to abandon.

The SIS issued a statement later on the appearance of Ibrahim, demanding BBC to “issue an immediate apology in the same manner the BBC documentary report was aired and published for the gross professional error regarding citizen Zubeida, to the extent of absolute falsification and fabrication.”

The SIS also asked the English network to take into consideration the remarks mentioned in the SIS earlier statement and take all necessary professional and administrative measures to correct the errors and violations included in its report.

On March 3, the Egyptian Top Prosecutor Nabil Ahmed Sadeq remanded in custody for 15 days pending investigation Mona Mahmoud Ahmed, known as the mother of Zubeida, for claiming that her daughter had forcibly disappeared and tortured by the Egyptian security forces.