Three Israeli journalists detained; photographer injured

Feb 2, 2011, 21:12 GMT

Cairo/Tel Aviv - Egyptian authorities briefly detained three Israeli journalists covering the protests, an Israeli official said Wednesday, while many others in the media were attacked.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the three journalists were released shortly after their arrest, but would not be allowed to continue working in Egypt and would likely be put on a plane back to Israel late Wednesday.

He was unable to confirm reports that they were arrested because they didn't have valid work visas.

A photojournalist from the european pressphoto agency epa was also detained Wednesday, colleagues said. He was earlier attacked while taking photographs of the protests at the Egyptian Museum and had suffered an injury to the head. Further details were not immediately available.

The German Press Agency dpa is a shareholder in epa, which is based in Frankfurt, Germany.

Meanwhile Germany's public broadcaster ZDF television denied earlier accounts that one of its reporters had been arrested.

A spokesman for ZDF explained that two separate teams of journalists, one for the ZDF and the other a US group, were stopped at a control point while returning to Cairo from Alexandria.

While the ZDF team was allowed to proceed onwards, the US team was detained. There was some ZDF equipment in the car of the US team, the spokesman said. As far as he had heard, the US team was still in custody.

In another incident, a Turkish reporter for Fox TV and his driver were kidnapped by a group of armed men. They were later rescued by police after the journalist was able to call for help.

A team of television and radio journalists from Germany's ARD station vacated their offices on Wednesday after a group of thugs attempted to storm the offices of al-Arabiya television, which were located in the same building.

Later, al-Arabiya said that one of its reporters, Ahmad Abdalla, was missing.

In a further development, the Reporters Without Borders group in a statement condemned the arrest of Belgian journalist Serge Dumont in Cairo.

'The Middle East correspondent of three newspapers - Belgium's Le Soir, Switzerland's Le Temps and France's La Voix du Nord - was arrested and beaten by men in plain-clothes at midday while in the central neighbourhood of Choubra,' the group said.

'He was then taken to a military post, where he was accused of 'spying' and was told he would be handed over to the security services,' the statement added.

Le Temps in Switzerland, confirmed the incident on its website.