Alaa Abd el-Fattah<\/a> has been pardoned after almost six years in jail in Egypt and hunger strikes by Abd el-Fattah and his mother.<\/p>\nThe announcement was made on Monday in Egypt\u2019s official gazette and followed an appeal from the National Council for Human Rights, the television channel Al Qahera News reported.<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
In a post on X, Abd el-Fattah\u2019s sister, Mona Seif, said: \u201cMy heart is going to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
Abd el-Fattah was arrested in September 2019 and was sentenced in December 2021 to five years in prison for \u201cspreading false news\u201d and harming Egypt\u2019s national interest.<\/p>\n
Rights groups have said Abd el-Fattah faced a \u201cgrossly unfair trial\u201d.<\/p>\n
He emerged as a leading pro-democracy activist and blogger during Egypt\u2019s 2011 popular uprising, which forced President Hosni Mubarak from office after three decades in power.<\/p>\n
In 2015, he was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of violating protest laws two years earlier when current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a coup against Mubarak\u2019s democratically elected successor, Mohamed Morsi.<\/p>\n
El-Sisi went on to win the presidency in a disputed 2014 vote marred by low turnout and a sweeping crackdown on dissent. He has since been accused of jailing tens of thousands of his critics.<\/p>\n
Abd el-Fattah remained imprisoned until March 2019 when he was released on probation. But within six months, he was rearrested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He was arrested in 2019 in Egypt and sentenced in 2021 to five years in jail for \u201cspreading…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17706,43,37472,1259,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-161745","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-egypt","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-human-rights","11":"tag-middle-east","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-top-news","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-topnews","16":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}