It has come to light that British journalist Bel Trew, a correspondent for The Times, was arrested on 20th February and subsequently expelled from the country. Trew was reporting in the working-class area of Cairo, Shubra, when she was detained. In an article published by The Times, Trew explains how she thought a recording of her interview in Shubra would see to her release – an informer, she says, at the café where she had been conducting the interview had told police that she was discussing the Egyptian state’s involvement in a migrant boat sinking off the coast of Rosetta in 2016, but she had in fact been discussing a different event and had not mentioned the government. “The taxi had just pulled away from the café in central Cairo when a minibus of plain-clothes police officers cut us off. Five men jumped out and took me to a nearby police station,” Trew says, describing what happened after the interview she had conducted with a poor man whose nephew had probably drowned at sea en route to Italy. “By the time word reached the interior ministry, it had included a rumour that I…
