Egypt released an Al Jazeera journalist Sunday who had been behind bars since December 2013, allowing him to leave the country, the government said.
Australian journalist Peter Greste left Egypt at about 4 p.m. local time (9 a.m. ET), Egyptian Interior Ministry spokesman Hany Abdel Latif said.
Greste’s lawyer, Amr Eldib, said the journalist’s release was, in effect, an extradition.
“According to Egyptian law, this is considered an extradition. Peter must be tried in Australia and authorities there must determine if he is guilty or not,” Eldib said.
Greste was one of three Al Jazeera journalists jailed. The other two, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, remain behind bars. Fahmy, who used to work for CNN, has dual nationality, with Egyptian-Canadian citizenship. Baher Mohamed is Egyptian.
They were convicted of supporting the banned Muslim Brotherhood, but constantly maintained their innocence. Al Jazeera demanded their release, as did a chorus of many other international journalists.
Egypt’s highest court recently accepted the appeal of the three journalists, who always denied the charges, and granted them a retrial.
Al Anstey, the managing director of Al Jazeera English, said he spoke with Greste earlier Sunday. The journalist ” sounded strong.”
“He sounded immensely relieved — perhaps not celebratory but immensely relieved,” Anstey told CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
Anstey sought to keep attention on Fahmy and Mohamed.
“It’s very unclear what’s happening to Baher and what’s happening for Mohamed,” he said. “But we just need to bring this injustice to an end and to get them out.”
An Egypt in turmoil
At the time of their arrest in December 2013, Egypt was mired in political turmoil surrounding the removal, by coup, of President Mohamed Morsy in his Muslim Brotherhood-backed government. After Morsy was ousted, the longstanding political party was declared a terrorist organization by the military, which had staged the coup.
Greste described in a January 2014 letter how he and his colleagues were detained, saying that interior ministry officials burst into a hotel room that he and producer Mohamed Fadel Fahmy were using. Officials rushed Baher Mohamed’s home, he said.
“I am nervous as I write this,” the letter read. “I am in my cold prison cell after my first official exercise session — four glorious hours in the grass yard behind our block and I don’t want that right to be snatched away.”
“That is why I have sought, until now, to fight my imprisonment quietly from within, to make the authorities understand that this is all a terrible mistake, that I’ve been caught in the middle of a political struggle that is not my own,” he wrote. “But after two weeks in prison it is now clear that this is a dangerous decision. It validates an attack not just on me and my two colleagues but on freedom of speech across Egypt.”
Amnesty International and other observers have long held that Greste, Fahmy and Mohamed were pawns in a geopolitical dispute between Egypt and Qatar, the small Middle Eastern country that finances Al Jazeera.
Qatar has long been perceived as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egypt is the sixth leading jailer of journalists in the world, according to a census the non-partisan Committee to Protect Journalists took in December 2014.
The jailing and sentencing of the Al Jazeera journalists generated outrage from colleagues and activists around the world. A campaign led by Al Jazeera declared that “Journalism is not a crime.”
Many tweeted under the hashtag #freeajstaff and journalists, including CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who held up a sign with the campaign on her show.
On Sunday, CPJ called on Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to “pardon and release Greste’s Al Jazeera colleagues Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, and the other journalists still behind bars for doing their work.”
Human Rights Watch did the same.
A ‘political prisoner’
Greste’s colleagues, friends and family members tried hard over these many months to keep his name and those of the other journalists in the news.
Last April, Greste’s parents told CNN’s Fred Pleitgen that their son had nothing for mental stimulation and that all three of the journalists were not allowed to have any reading material.
The three men kept themselves occupied, said Lois Greste, by reading the labels of plastic bottles and food containers.
“They made a mural on the wall, which said ‘Freedom Now.’ Unfortunately, that had to be pulled down because the prison authorities considered that as a slogan,” she said. “But instead (Peter) got more creative, and out of foil made a sun with rays that go out to a meter wide. It’s arranged so that the sun hits the foil and lights up the whole of the room. So I think that’s wonderful.”
In an interview on “Reliable Sources” last June, Greste’s father said it wasn’t unreasonable to call his son a “political prisoner.”
“It looks like a kidnapping by the state, as it were,” Juris Greste said, even as he emphasized that he and his wife “bear no ill will against Egypt or its people.”
“Peter had no reason, no motive for doing anything like the allegations against him,” Lois Greste said. “He would have reported the same story, be it for CNN, BBC, Reuters or anybody else.”
Baher’s wife suspicious, asks why now?
Al Sisi issued a law last November giving him the power to deport foreign defendants. While this law brought hope to two of the Al Jazeera defendants’ families, it stoked concerns that the case would lose its international appeal once the two were out, leaving the Egyptian defendant behind bars.
Jihan Rashed, Baher Mohamed’s wife, told CNN that she couldn’t believe Greste has been released. Why him and not her Egyptian husband?
“Because they were all three in the same case, I don’t know (how) only one got released. I don’t know why they released him (Greste) now after a year. What’s special about this timing?” she demanded. “Are the foreigners more important in our country? We used to hear that the three would be pardoned, but does this mean that only foreigners will be released?”
Rashed is worried but optimistic because she’s confident that Greste will tell the world that their imprisonment is unjust, she said.
“No one will be silent. We won’t be silent,” she said. “Peter won’t be silent.”
Rashed said that releasing Greste proves that the case isn’t about terrorism as the Egyptian government claimed, but about targeting journalists. “(Mohamed) was doing his job,” she said. “He was relaying news, saying what the Muslim Brotherhood said and what the government said. Do I need to explain what a journalist should do?”
Fahmy’s mother, Wafa Abdel Hamid Bassiouni, appealed to Al Sisi in a statement that an Egyptian news outlet published Sunday, telling the President that her son is ill with Hepatitis C and an injured shoulder.
“As a mother and an Egyptian citizen I appeal to you, Mr. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to pardon my son… It hurts me to see his health deteriorating while I have little access to him,” she wrote. “My father and uncles have served in the highest ranks of the police force and the military. They have spent their lives defending Egypt… It breaks my heart that the son of a patriotic family like ours has been wrongfully framed as a terrorist in a trial that produced no evidence to (support) the accusations.”