Egypt puts cartoonist behind bars

CAIRO— A popular Egyptian cartoonist was arrested Sunday on charges of running a website without a licence, the Interior Ministry said, in the latest escalation of a campaign to silence the government’s online critics.

The cartoonist, Islam Gawish, 26, who has 1.6 million Facebook followers, was arrested during a police raid on the offices of a news website based in Cairo. Although his satirical cartoons have been published online, Gawish was not seen as an especially vehement critic of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

It was the most prominent arrest since the Jan. 25 anniversary of the 2011 uprising that ultimately toppled President Hosni Mubarak, which had been preceded by a wave of arrests and closures that focused on democracy activists and well-known cultural spaces in downtown Cairo.

Although el-Sissi’s government has silenced many critical voices in Egypt’s major news media, either by arresting journalists or forcing them into exile, it has struggled to contain free speech on the Internet, which is one of the few forums for open dissent at a time when public protest has been all but outlawed.

Facebook and other social media sites, which played a role in organizing the 2011 uprising, are popular with millions of Egyptians, but a handful of high-profile prosecutions have sent a warning about the limits of tolerance for political discussion.

The Interior Ministry said Gawish was being charged with possessing pirated software and running an unauthorized personal website. It was not clear whether the website in question was his Facebook page.

Gawish’s lawyer, Mahmoud Othman, said, “They have shut down art venues, and now they are arresting innovators.

“The state must be very fragile if it is afraid of cartoonists.”