Mohamed FahmyCEO
MOHAMED FADEL FAHMY is an award-winning journalist, author and human rights defender. Fahmy worked extensively in the Middle East and North Africa mostly for CNN. He covered the Iraq War in 2003 for the Los Angeles Times and entered Iraq on the first day of the war. Upon completion of his one-year mission, he authored his first book, Baghdad Bound.
In 2007, Fahmy completed a one-year mission with the International Committee of the Red Cross, protecting the rights of political prisoners, the missing, and refugees in Beirut, Lebanon.
In 2011, he won the Peabody award alongside the CNN teams covering the Arab Spring. In the same year, he won the Tom Renner investigative reporting award for producing the documentary Death in the Desert, which exposed for the first time the organized crime rings operating the illegal human trafficking of Sub-Saharan Africans to Israel through Sinai, Egypt.
In September 2013, Fahmy accepted a new post as bureau chief for Al Jazeera English in Egypt. Three months later, he was arrested with two colleagues and spent 438 days incarcerated in Egypt on false charges of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood — designated as terrorists in many countries — and of fabricating news to serve their agenda.
He was pardoned in 2015 and moved to Vancouver, Canada where he accepted a job briefly as an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia and wrote a column for the Toronto Star.
Fahmy is the recipient of the Freedom to Read Award (Writers’ Union of Canada), the Canadian Commission World Press Freedom Award/UNESCO and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association’s Liberty Award for Human Rights, among others.
His new book is entitled The Marriott Cell: An Epic Journey From Cairo’s Scorpion Prison to Freedom.
@MFFahmy11
