Germany detains Al-Jazeera reporter on Egypt warrant

BERLIN: A renowned Al-Jazeera journalist was being held in German police custody Sunday pending a court decision on his further detention on an arrest warrant issued by his native Egypt.

Ahmed Mansour, 52, a senior journalist with the Qatar-based broadcaster’s Arabic service, was detained at Tegel airport on Saturday on an Egyptian arrest warrant, Al-Jazeera said. Mansour, who holds dual Egyptian-British nationality, was trying to board a Qatar Airways flight heading to Doha, the station reported.
About 80 protesters meanwhile gathered outside the courthouse where Mansour is being held, calling on authorities to set him free.
In a case that raised issues about press freedom and German relations with Egypt under President Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, Mansour has been accused by Cairo of committing “several crimes.”
“He is in police custody,” a spokesman for the Berlin public prosecutor’s office, Martin Steltner, told AFP Sunday.
“The Berlin prosecutor’s office is examining the legal assistance request” from Egypt, he added.
Mansour’s detention is the latest in a long series of legal entanglements between Egypt and its satellite news channels. The station said he previously had been sentenced in absentia in Egypt to 15 years in prison over allegedly torturing an unnamed lawyer in Tahrir Square in 2011, a charge both he and the channel rejected.
Mansour is to appear before a judge, who is to decide as early as Sunday whether to keep him in detention and launch extradition procedures or release him, Berlin authorities said.
Al-Jazeera said on its website that an Egyptian court had sentenced Mansour in absentia in 2014 to 15 years in prison, for “torturing a lawyer in 2011 on Tahrir Square” in Cairo, epicenter of an anti-regime uprising that brought down former president Hosni Mubarak.
“Mansour has rejected these absurd accusations,” the network said. The 52-year-old journalist also told Al-Jazeera he was facing rape, kidnapping and robbery charges, charges which he denied.
Three Al-Jazeera journalists, including Australia’s Peter Greste and Canada’s Mohamed Fahmy, were arrested in Cairo in 2013 and sentenced to up to 10 years in prison on charges of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
Greste has since been deported while the other two are facing a retrial.
In a video aired by the Doha-based pan-Arab satellite channel Sunday Mansour said the charges against him were “false.”