Mohamed Fahmy, a former Al-Jazeera English journalist who was released from jail in Egypt in 2015, has been appointed CEO of The Investigative Journal, a newly launched online investigative news platform.
In December 2013, Canadian-Egyptian Fahmy and two Al Jazeera English colleagues, Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed, were arrested by the Egyptian authorities.
The trio were accused of conspiring with a terrorist group and fabricating news to portray Egypt in a state of civil war. They were also accused of filming events in Cairo without prior approval.
On 23 June 2014, Fahmy was found guilty by a Cairo criminal court and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Fahmy abrogated his Egyptian citizenship in February 2015 to benefit from a presidential executive order allowing the deportation of foreign prisoners. His colleague Peter Greste was deported to Australia.
In September 2015 and ahead of a visit to New York, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi pardoned Fahmy. El-Sisi also restored Fahmy's Egyptian citizenship in June 2016.
Shortly after his release, Fahmy said that he was suing Al-Jazeera English for $100 million in damages related to the case.
After his new appointment yesterday, Fahmy said, "I see no better time to work with the world's investigative journalists on stories often overlooked by the mainstream media," according to a press release by the new outlet.
“We are living in an age of unprecedented attacks on journalists, with 80 colleagues murdered and 348 imprisoned in 2018 alone," he commented.
Since its initial inception in February, the Investigative Journal has published reports by prominent journalists from around the world, including three-time New York Times bestselling author and journalist, Richard Miniter, and Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt.
Miniter exposed an unprecedented cyber-espionage operation by the Qatar government, while Bozkurt uncovered wiretaps exposing the Turkish government's collusion with ISIS to smuggle tens of thousands of foreign and Turkish militants across the Turkish border to fight in Syria.
Fahmy, 45, has worked extensively in the Middle East and North Africa, for CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera.
He authored a book about his imprisonment in Egypt titled The Marriot Cell: An Epic Journey from Cairo's Scorpion Prison to Freedom.
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