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An al-Jazeera English journalist jailed in Egypt has officially applied to marry his fiancee in prison, as Mohamed Fahmy and his two jailed colleagues, whom he hopes will be his best men, marked 250 days behind bars.
An ex-CNN reporter, Fahmy was due to marry his fiancee Marwa Omara this year. But the wedding was postponed after Fahmy, the channel's Canadian-Egyptian bureau chief, was arrested for political reasons last December, and later jailed for seven years, along with the Australian ex-BBC correspondent Peter Greste. Their Egyptian producer, Baher Mohamed, was given a decade-long sentence.
The trio have filed appeals, but with no new court date set, Omara says she and Fahmy can no longer wait. "Bars shouldn't prevent our love," said Omara. "It's a message to the world that Mohamed is innocent, and that I believe in his innocence. And it's a personal message to him that I love him and that I'm next to him."
The Mohamed and Greste families have also experienced great personal hardship. Greste's elderly parents have temporarily moved from Australia to Egypt to be nearer their son, while Mohamed missed the birth of his son, who was born last month. In a sombre letter to his youngest child, Mohamed wrote: "Sorry because you were born where free people are behind bars, including your father."
The trio were convicted of aiding terrorists and spreading false news – politicised charges that prosecutors struggled to justify in court. It is widely accepted that the three journalists were convicted as proxies for the entire al-Jazeera network, whose Arabic channels – unlike AJE's neutral English-language coverage – favour the Muslim Brotherhood, the bugbears of the current Egyptian government. In court, the three AJE journalists were frequently accused of involvement with al-Jazeera's local Egyptian channel, al-Jazeera Mubasher Misr (AJMM), even though the trio themselves never worked for AJMM, and often criticised it.
On Wednesday, the Egyptian government ordered officials to try to stop the transmission of AJMM in Egypt – a move welcomed by Fahmy's family. They feel the tone of AJMM's reporting has hardened Egyptian public opinion against the jailed journalists, which in turn makes the prospect of a presidential pardon less likely. "Their biased coverage hasn't been helping the case," said Omara.
But there are signs that public opinion is shifting. Egypt's president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, has admitted he wished the journalists had never been arrested. And this week, one of Egypt's richest men – Naguib Sawiris, a frequent critic of al-Jazeera – released a YouTube video calling for the release of Fahmy, whom he knows personally. It marks a turnaround since January, when Sawiris tried to justify his arrest during a CNN interview.
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