Qatar Arrests Engineer Ali Salem
Ali Salem was born in the village of Akhnawai in Tanta in 1965. He studied at Al-Azhar Al-Sharif and joined the Faculty of Engineering and worked in Egyptian television. In 1995, Hamad bin Khalifa, the former Emir of Qatar, requested the assignment of specialized engineers of talent. Salem was nominated by the Egyptian Ministry of Information to work in Qatar. He then travelled and participated in the establishment of the Qatari Al-Jazeera channel in 1996. He was honoured in February 2019 as one of the most prominent workers in the sports media in Qatar because he is the operational director of the beIN Sport sports channels. However, a day after his honour, Ali Salem disappeared for 10 days. His family then learned that he was arrested through the “The Hidden is More Immense” program. He was held for 6 months without charges and then charged with espionage for the benefit of a foreign country, in addition to the accusation of obtaining money from a foreign party under the name of international bribery. Engineer Salem was subjected to an attempted murder by the Qatari authorities. They prevented visits from him and set an emergency trial without telling his family in addition to preventing his lawyer from meeting him. The authorities additionally refused to transfer him to a medical centre after his condition deteriorated from solitary confinement in which he remained despite the expiration of his legal period. in addition, The Qatari authorities threatened his family to prevent them from talking with the press and prevented his sons and wife from returning to their homeland. In February 2020 trial, the Qatari court acquitted Salem of the charge of espionage for lack of evidence, however, it sentenced him to two years and a fine of 500,000 riyals and deported him from Qatar after implementation, on charges of disclosing work secrets to Egypt, based on the alleged e-mails about him. Salem suffered greatly from the deterioration of his health because the Qatari authorities prevented him from taking his necessary medicines, in addition to not eating appropriate food, which shows how “Salem” was subjected to a lot of repression and intimidation during his detention.
