Fahmy’s family hopes to return to Montreal
Jailed journalist’s trial was ‘travesty of justice’: Amnesty International
The Fahmy family has two goals: get their journalist son out of an Egyptian prison and come back to their beloved Montreal, a city they fell in love with and embraced in 1990.
The flood of encouraging messages they have received from around the world, but especially from their adopted country, since Mohamed Fahmy was sentenced this week to seven years in jail following what Amnesty International has dubbed a “sham of a trial” has been overwhelming.
“People have been asking if we want donations, if we need help, and some of the messages have brought me to tears,” said Fahmy’s younger brother, Sherif, in an interview Thursday from Kuwait. “When this is over, I hope we can come and spend the rest of our lives among these people.”
The three grown boys of the family — Sherif, 29, Adel, 36, and Mohamed, 40 — travelled the world after getting their educations in Canada. The two youngest work in Kuwait, while the oldest had been working for various news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the BBC and CNN.
But all that changed when Mohamed Fahmy, who began work as the Cairo bureau chief for Al Jazeera English in September, was detained just three months later, along with colleagues Australian Peter Greste and Egyptian Baher Mohamed, for “falsifying information” and being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
Fahmy’s parents, both established professionals in Montreal, went immediately to Egypt where they have stayed, trying to free their son from his Kafkaesque ordeal. Instead of planning their eldest’s wedding set for Feb. 25, they are caught up in steady barrage of legal wrangling, with not so much as a peep from the Canadian government.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper took his time reacting to the verdict, and when he finally did Thursday, he lacked the immediate shock of the Australian prime minister, nor was he appalled as the British foreign secretary was. Harper simply said he had “deep concerns.”
Human rights group Amnesty International attended the trial for Fahmy and his colleagues and concluded that “the prosecution failed to produce a single shred of solid evidence.”
“Consigning these men to years in prison after such a farcical spectacle is a travesty of justice,” Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, said in a statement.
According to the Guardian newspaper, whose journalist attended the proceedings, prosecutors presented dozens of irrelevant videos and recordings — taken from the accuseds’ hard drives and phones. Presented as proof that the men had fabricated news, they included footage of trotting horses by Sky News Arabia, a BBC documentary about Somalia, a song by the Australian musician Gotye, a program about sheep farming, a Kenyan news conference and photos of Greste’s family.
And oddly, the judge wore sunglasses in court.
“At times, everyone was laughing and the judge was caught several times falling asleep,” Sherif said.
Fahmy’s parents, Fadel, 67, and Wafaa Bassiouni, 62, immigrated to Canada in 1990 when Bassiouni was transferred by Lufthansa to work in Mirabel Airport as a ticketing and reservations manager. Her husband, a trained chemical engineer, started his own real estate investment business. They first lived on Fort St., then Tupper St., before buying a home on de la Montagne St.
The family of five became Canadian citizens in 1994 — a ceremony engraved in all their memories.
“My mother and father were studying very hard (for the citizenship test), as if they were in university and made flash cards to study,” Sherif said.
“It’s a beautiful country, and when this nightmare is over, we’ve all agreed to move back to Canada,” he said. “We’ve all seen enough of the Middle East.”
The three sons were always very close, Sherif said, nostalgically remembering watching the World Cup together.
“Mohamed was very gifted and talented and always at the top of his class,” he said. “He was often MVP on his soccer and volleyball teams.”
His older brother, who studied business administration in Vancouver, ended up working in television in Dubai. From there, he covered the Iraq War for the Los Angeles Times, worked as a prisoners’ rights officer with the Red Cross in Beirut in 2008 before being hired by the BBC in Cairo in 2010. He covered the 2011 Egyptian revolution — the so-called Arab Spring — for CNN.
“As you can tell from his career, he’s been in worse situations, like getting shot at in war and disappearing without a word for several weeks,” Sherif said.
“It hurts now remembering Canada and the time I spent with Mohamed in Montreal,” he said. “He taught me to be passionate about everything.”