Journalist Joins His Jailer’s Side in a Bizarre Persian Gulf Feud
Asked at the news conference if he had consulted Saudi or Emirati officials, or if he was close to the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef
al-Otaiba, Mr. Fahmy said, falsely, "To simply answer your question, no." (Mr. Fahmy said this past week that he was protecting a friend.)
Egypt’s Emirati-backed military government, which removed Mr. Morsi from power in July 2013, considered Al Jazeera a tool of Qatar
and the Brotherhood, and Egyptian security forces had already raided the offices of Al Jazeera’s Arabic language channels before the network hired Mr. Fahmy, in September 2013.
He called the assertions in their resulting report "absurd," saying they were "fabrications" by Al Jazeera and Qatar in "a systematic campaign to smear my reputation." The investigation raised far-fetched allegations
that Mr. Fahmy had worked covertly for nearly two decades as a spy for Italy, beginning when he was still a full-time college student in Vancouver.
Mr. Fahmy, 43, has eagerly joined in, holding a recent news conference in Washington to add his voice to Saudi and Emirati accusations
that Qatar and Al Jazeera conspire with Islamist extremists.
Mr. Fahmy later wrote in a memoir that he had been convinced
that Al Jazeera would maintain, and the Egyptian government would accept, a bright-line distinction between the sister Arabic and English networks.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKJULY 1, 2017
LONDON — The journalist Mohamed Fahmy had been working in Cairo for Al Jazeera when the Egyptian authorities threw him in prison
for more than a year, accusing him of stirring up unrest as an agent of the channel’s owner, the Qatari government.