The Egyptian-Canadian journalist sentenced to seven years in a Cairo jail marked 200 days of imprisonment handcuffed to a hospital bed, his brother says.
Mohamed Fahmy is finally receiving medical care for an arm injury, but he is restrained and surrounded by guards in the hospital, his brother Sherif Fahmy told CTV News Channel Wednesday.
Still, “he’s happy that he’s finally receiving some medical attention,” his brother said.
He said Fahmy “gets extremely emotional” whenever his family tells him about the support he’s been getting since he was jailed, along with two Al-Jazeera colleagues.
Fahmy, 40, was working in Cairo as a bureau chief for the international broadcaster when he and two others were arrested in late December. They were accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which the current Egyptian government considers a terrorist group.
Fahmy and his colleagues have denied all allegations against them, and said they were simply doing their jobs in Egypt.
But following a widely denounced trial, Fahmy was sentenced to seven years in prison on terrorism-related charges.
Fahmy’s supporters have criticized the Canadian government’s response, saying officials should be applying more pressure on Egyptian authorities to release him. Some have speculated that Fahmy’s dual citizenship makes him less of a priority in Ottawa.
“We, as a family, think very highly of our country, Canada, and do not want to believe that there are double standards,” Sherif Fahmy said Wednesday.
“But what we know for a fact is that there were Canadian citizens also detained unjustly in an Egyptian prison last summer and the government’s response was completely different to what we have seen in my brother’s case.”
A spokesperson for Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said this week that the minister raised Fahmy’s case during a phone conversation with his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, about the situation in Gaza.
The spokesperson declined to provide details about that discussion, but Baird has said that he doesn't believe "bullhorn diplomacy" will help win Fahmy's release.
Fahmy's family is working on taking the case to an appeal court. In the meantime, his brother says support from Canadians and people around the world is “extremely important.”
“I believe that Mohammed and his colleagues are living on this kind of support,” he said. “They are actually surviving because of this support.”
With files from The Canadian Press
