Jihan Rashid, the wife of al-Jazeera journalist Baher Mohamed. Photograph: Mohamed al-Shahed/AFP/Getty Images
A court in Egypt has freed two imprisoned al-Jazeera English journalists on bail, nearly a fortnight after their Australian colleague, Peter Greste, was deported.
The decisions means Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed have been allowed to walk free for the first time in 14 months. They were arrested in December 2013 on trumped-up charges of helping terrorists and spreading false news.
Adel Fahmy tweeted jubilantly on Friday morning that his journalist brother had been released after posting bail. Baher Mohamed was also freed, his family told the Guardian soon afterwards.
Fahmy had been ordered to put up 250,000 Egyptian pounds (£21,000/$US33,000) for his freedom, but Mohamed and several students also tried alongside Greste have no fee to pay.
Fahmy is considered a flight risk because he is a Canadian citizen. He had previously asked to be deported to Canada, following Greste’s example. But after a public debate in Egypt about whether foreigners should be released while Egyptians continued to be detained on the same charges, Fahmy’s deportation was delayed – despite him renouncing his Egyptian passport – and now seems to have been ruled out completely.
The conditions of Fahmy’s bail require him to check in with police daily until his next court appearance on 23 February.
In Thursday’s brief hearing, Fahmy personally asked the judge why Greste was free while his colleagues were still in jail. “I don’t understand how a defendant in the same case with the same evidence … is on the beach in Australia,” said Fahmy, after unfurling an Egyptian flag to demonstrate that his heart remained Egyptian despite being encouraged by officials to give up his citizenship.
Baher Mohamed’s lawyer, Mohamed Hussein, echoed Fahmy’s stance: “If a stranger to this country has been released, so it’s proper that one of this country should be released.”
Minutes later the judge appeared to agree, announcing bail for all defendants, to cheers from a packed courtroom and tears from the defendants’ families.
Fahmy’s fiancee, Marwa Omara, said of the bail demand: “We’re willing to pay whatever it takes to see Mohamed … I want to see him with me. I want to have a romantic dinner with him. Go to the beach. Dance, enjoy life.”
Omara also spoke of the relief of being released from the pain of the past year. “I’m a simple woman, not into politics,” she said. “I found myself doing things [in the past year] I never planned to do. Now I can sleep.”
Baher Mohamed’s wife, Jehan, was in floods of tears. “I will go immediately to the kids. They will be so happy,” she said. “We were living in misery for so long.”
On the other side of the world, in Brisbane, Australia, Greste tweeted his congratulations to his soon-to-be-released colleagues. “This is a huge step forward. Not time to declare it over, but at least you get to go home!”
Their 14 months in prison has taken a heavy toll on Mohamed, Fahmy and their families. Mohamed could not attend his third child’s birth, while Fahmy has developed a chronic shoulder condition after failing to receive adequate treatment for an injury sustained shortly before his arrest.
Both spent time in solitary confinement, prior to their politicised conviction in June 2014, in a case that trial observers denounced as laughably flawed.
Evidence presented by the prosecution in the first trial included a song by the musician Gotye, a video report about sheep, footage of stables and a press conference in Kenya. In January, an appeals court recognised these flaws, rescinding the trio’s jail terms, which ranged between seven and 10 years, andsending the case to retrial.
But their release only came on Thursday, and even then it was conditional. In a statement released after the announcement, al-Jazeera said: “Bail is a small step in the right direction, and allows Baher and Mohamed to spend time with their families after 411 days apart. The focus though is still on the court reaching the correct verdict at the next hearing by dismissing this absurd case and releasing both these fine journalists unconditionally.”
In court, Jehan Mohamed suppressed her smiles to make an serious point to a scrum of journalists: “You have to come to the next session as well.”
The case continues on 23 February.
At least 10 other journalists remain in jail in Egypt, including the Demotix photographer Mahmoud Abouzeid, who is among at least 16,000 political prisoners in Egyptian prisons.
There was relief for a few of them this week, as 36 men sentenced to death last year, in a mass hearing that lasted less than an hour, were given a retrial. The government said the news marked “the latest reflection of the independence, fairness, and transparency of Egypt’s judiciary”.