Why this mattersSo let's talk about how this trial actually went.
The judge cleared the courtroom. Everyone out except Attalah and her lawyers. Then he filled it back up with plainclothes officers and a National Security Agency officer.
He rejected every single request her defence team made.
Then he appointed a lawyer her team had never even heard of to represent her. Her eight actual lawyers objected. Attalah herself objected, in court. The judge wouldn't even write that down.
Right now she's still in custody at the courthouse. Two Egyptian lawyers say she stays locked up until the fine gets paid. Reuters says it's custody pending bail. Nobody's cleared that up yet.
This is the sixth legal case against Mada Masr or its journalists in six years. It's the first one that actually went to trial.
Attalah founded Mada Masr back in 2013. Egypt has blocked the site inside the country since May 2017.
And here's the twist. Mada Masr applied for a licence in 2018. Then again in 2020. Silence both times. In 2022, during a totally different case, it found out the 2018 application had actually been rejected. It applied again, a full new application, in June 2023. Still no answer.
So Mada Masr has spent nearly ten years trying to get a licence it just got convicted for not having.
Mada Masr says that's exactly the point. Prosecutors say the outlet operates illegally and has published false news. Mada Masr says the licensing system itself is being used as a weapon against it.
This verdict lands about a month after Egyptian security forces arrested six journalists from a different outlet, Matsadaash, on 28 and 29 September. All six are still sitting in pretrial detention.
Before today's ruling, 119 rights groups and media organisations had already called this an unprecedented attack on press freedom.
Sara Qudah of the Committee to Protect Journalists says quote "no independent journalist in the country is safe".
Hossam Bahgat was in the courtroom. He runs the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. He says the judge wrote down requests attributed to a lawyer who hadn't actually spoken.
Egypt's government says it's committed to freedom of expression, but that the media has to operate within the law and respect national security.
Egypt ranks 169th out of 180 countries on the press freedom index. The Committee to Protect Journalists says Egypt is holding 25 journalists behind bars right now, the highest number since 2021.
So here's what we still don't know. Whether Attalah stays locked up through an appeal. Whether Mada Masr has any real way to fight the closure. And whether other independent Egyptian outlets are next.
