Egypt's foreign affairs ministry said on Sunday that US researcher Michele Dunne was denied entry to Egypt on Friday because she didn't have a non-tourism visa.

Dunne, senior associate in the Middle East Programme of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had arrived in Cairo from Istanbul to attend a conference held the government-endorsed Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs

The foreign ministry, in a press communiqué, said Dunne went to the Egyptian consulate in Washington to request a non-tourism visa, where she submitted a request form but withdrew her passport without completing the procedure.

State news agency MENA reported on Saturday that Dunne was barred from entering the country for "security reasons.” Similarly, the executive manager of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs Ameen Shalabi said in a phone interview with satellite channel Al-Hayat 2 that Dunne was on the lists of the airport's "expected arrivals.”

Shalabi added that Dunne was invited to listen to the objective opinions of numerous Egyptian experts, and said he feared that the refusal to allow her entry, especially given that she was the only critical researcher out of 20 invited to the conference, would make her more aggressive in her criticisms of Egypt's post-Morsi roadmap.

Dunne's research focuses on political and economic change in Arab countries, particularly Egypt, as well as US foreign policy in the Middle East, according to her institutional biography.