In an apparent escalation of a severe crackdown against the news media under Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, officials in Cairo detained The New York Times correspondent David Kirkpatrick after he arrived Monday and held him incommunicado for hours before forcing him onto a flight back to London without explanation, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
After he was detained, Kirkpatrick's phone was confiscated and he was held without food or water for seven hours before being escorted onto an EgyptAir flight back to London Tuesday, with an air marshal holding his passport until the plane reached Heathrow Airport.
"We're concerned about reports of the unexplained refusal of entry to Egypt of a U.S. citizen New York Times journalist," said Sam Werberg, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. "We have raised our concerns with Egyptian officials."
Kirkpatrick, who was Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times from 2011 to 2015, wrote a recent book on Egypt, "Into the Hands of the Soldiers," which covered the Arab Spring uprising of 2011 and the 2013 coup that brought el-Sisi to power. This and some of his other reporting have irked the Egyptian authorities.
Most of Cairo's repression against journalists has been directed toward Egyptians, with dozens imprisoned or forced into exile. But lately Egypt has taken stronger action against representatives of Western media, apparently emboldened, according to the Times, by a lack of pushback from the U.S against the crackdown.
Defenders of press freedom are concerned President Donald Trump's verbal attacks on the media encourage autocrats worldwide, such as el-Sisi, to take aggressive action against journalists.
Trump has praised el-Sisi, who is among the president's closest allies in the Middle East.
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