Al-Jazeera Cairo bureau chief detained

Police have detained the Cairo bureau chief of Al-Jazeera for his reporting on the Sinai beach resort bombings this week, the pan-Arabic television channel reported Thursday. Hussein Abdel Ghani said in a call broadcast on Al-Jazeera that he was being accused of ‘propagating false news’ about the three bomb blasts that killed 21 people and wounded 85 others in the town of Dahab on Monday. He denied the allegation.

‘It was a complete police kidnapping operation beyond the law,’

-Abdel Ghani said from the chief prosecutor’s office in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, where he had been taken after being arrested. ‘I was treated in a very inhuman way.’ It was not immediately possible to confirm the report with Egyptian authorities because it came in the early hours of Thursday morning. Abdel Ghani said he did not know how long he would be detained, but he was told he would at least spend the night in custody. Abdel Ghani said police officers who did not identify themselves had detained him in his Dahab hotel and bundled him into a van before he could even put on his shoes. He said the officers confiscated his cell phone so he could not call his office or family, but it was later returned. Abdel Ghani is a well-known face on Al-Jazeera, having reported from Cairo since the channel began in 1997. Previously he worked for the BBC Arabic service. (AP, ABC News,April 27, 2006)

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