WASHINGTON — The State Department called for the immediate release of Patrick George Zaki, a human rights researcher sentenced by an Egyptian court to three years in prison for spreading “fake news.”
The verdict Tuesday by an emergency security court in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura comes more than three years after Zaki was arrested in February 2020 at the Cairo airport during a visit from Italy, where he was studying at the University of Bologna. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the rights group where Zaki had worked, said he was tortured with electric shocks following his arrest.
Prosecutors later charged him with "spreading false news inside and outside of the country," an accusation linked to a 2019 online article Zaki wrote about being a member of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.
Zaki, who spent 22 months in pretrial detention before his provisional release in December 2021, was taken back into custody following the verdict on Tuesday.
