CAIRO, 4 December 2003 — In a dragged-out war of words between the Egyptian media and the US government, a newsweekly has attacked Radio Sawa, the station Washington is funding as part of efforts to burnish its image among Arabs.
Al-Ahram Hebdo, a French-language weekly published by the Al-Ahram group, accused Radio Sawa of falsely reporting the death of Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfuz and misreporting an accident as an attack.
“While the Americans accuse our public and private media of broadcasting erroneous and anti-Semitic news and of attacking all day long US occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Radio Sawa “broadcasts lies,” it said.
Editor Mohammed Salmawy, who wrote the article, said he had rushed to the phone after hearing the “sinister news” about the 91-year-old Mahfuz, whom he had seen the day before, to see if he was still in good health.
Sawa’s correspondent in Egypt, Nabil Sharah Eldin, categorically denied that he had ever announced Mahfuz’s death.
He also denied allegations by Al-Ahram Hebdo and other Egyptian newspapers that he had said an accident in which three Turkish tourists were killed was in fact an attack.
The Turks were killed Saturday and 21 others injured in a road accident in Luxor, southern Egypt, police said. A bus carrying 44 Turkish tourists overturned in a Luxor canal after a tire burst, investigators said.
“I didn’t say it was a terrorist act. I said that it was an accident, and I save my tapes, for various reasons, like to get paid,” Eldin said.
Radio Sawa broadcasts news, as well as American and Arabic music, in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf.
It is part of a broader campaign to boost Washington’s standing in Arab states where it is increasingly attacked over its policies toward the Palestinians, Iraq and Afghanistan. An Arabic television station, also financed by Washington, is expected to be launched soon.
