A New York Times reporter was detained for several hours on Monday night at Cairo International Airport before being expelled from the country by Egyptian authorities, according to a Tuesday report from the news outlet.
The paper says that David Kirkpatrick, a former Cairo bureau chief for the Times, was held for seven hours without food or water after having his cell phone confiscated.
{mosads}The move comes as the country has engaged in an ongoing crackdown on journalists and free speech in recent years under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, a former general in the nation’s military.
The 64-year-old Sisi came to power after a military coup in 2013 that deposed former President Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected leader.
Kirkpatrick, 48, was eventually sent to London on a flight on Tuesday.
The conflict comes one month after the Egyptian government demanded that CBS News pull an upcoming “60 Minutes” interview with Sisi.
According to CBS News, “60 Minutes” producers were contacted by the Egyptian ambassador and told the interview could not be aired. The outlet went ahead and broadcast the interview on Jan. 6.
CBS reported that questions to Sisi about imprisoning his opponents and the killing of 800 civilians by the government during his tenure as defense minister were “not the kind of news his government wanted broadcast.”
Sisi, in the interview, dismissed reports from Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organization, that allege Egypt has detained as many as 60,000 political prisoners, including some journalists and photographers.