| This is not good news. |
Egyptian TV producer Howaida Taha Matwali was banned earlier this week from traveling to Qatar, the headquarters of the Al Jazeera network, after airport police seized 50 video tapes she was carrying in her luggage, the statement said. Prosecutors ordered her detention on Saturday for further questioning, a police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
A special arts committee affiliated to the interior ministry viewed the video tapes and said they showed “unedited scenes of fabricated torture incidents, and assaults by individuals wearing police uniforms on others playing roles of male and female suspects inside studios decorated to look like police stations,” the statement said. The tapes have not been made public and the actors are not registered in actors’ syndicate, it added.
The bureau chief in Egypt for Al Jazeera, Hussein Abdel-Ghani, said that the footage was “reconstruction” which Matwali intended to use in a documentary film about torture in Egypt. Reconstructing scenes with actors “is a well known method in the production of documentaries, and Al Jazeera is not the only network to talk about torture,” Abdel-Ghani said.
| 'Reconstructing' scenes is something Al-Jizz learned from the AP, Reuters, AFP, CBS and the NYT. |
Al Jazeera said on its Arabic Web site that Egyptian prosecutors accused Matwali of: “filming footage that harms the national interest of the country; possessing and giving pictures contradicting the truth, and giving a wrong description of the situation in the country.”
Rights groups say torture, including sexual abuse, is routinely conducted in Egyptian police stations and in the interrogation of prisoners.
| Particularly if they've said something negative about Mubarak or Junior. |
Two security officers were detained in December on accusations they tortured and sexually abused a prisoner in a case that sparked a public uproar. Several Egyptian bloggers posted on the internet a video showing the prisoner naked from the waist down while being sodomized with a stick. Another video showing an unidentified woman tied to a stick and wailing with pain during what appeared to be a police interrogation was also recently posted on the Internet.