Al Jazeera has urged Germany to immediately release its journalist Ahmed Mansour, who was detained at a Berlin airport at the request of the Egyptian authorities. Mansour, a senior Al Jazeera Arabic TV journalist, was arrested at Berlin's Tegel airport at 13:20 GMT on Saturday as he tried to board a Qatar Airways flight from Berlin to Doha.
"The crackdown on journalists by Egyptian authorities is well known. Our network, as the Arab world's most-watched, has taken the brunt of this. Other countries must not allow themselves to be tools of this media oppression, least of all those that respect freedom of the media as does Germany," Acting Director General of Al Jazeera network Mostefa Souag said. "Ahmed Mansour is one of the Arab world's most respected journalists and must be released immediately." In a phone call, Mansour told Al Jazeera that he would remain in custody until Monday when he will face a German judge who will decide on his case.
Mansour was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison by Cairo's criminal court in 2014 on the charge of torturing a lawyer in Tahrir Square in 2011. He denied the charges. And in October last year, Interpol rejected Egypt's request for an international arrest warrant against him. Al Jazeera dismissed the accusation as a flimsy attempt at character assassination against of one of its leading journalists.