Egyptian Blogger Gets 4 Years in Prison

Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, 22, center, is escorted by police officers from a police van and towards a court house in Alexandria, Egypt Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007. The Egyptian blogger was convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger. (AP Photo) (AP)

The judge said Nabil insulted the Prophet Muhammad with a piece he wrote in 2005 after riots in which angry Muslim worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church over a play deemed offensive to Islam.

"Muslims revealed their true ugly face and appeared to all the world that they are full of brutality, barbarism and inhumanity," Nabil wrote in his blog. He called Muhammad and his 7th century followers, the Sahaba, "spillers of blood" for their teachings on warfare -- a comment cited by the judge.

In a later essay not cited by the court, Nabil clarified his comments, saying Muhammad was "great" but that his teachings on warfare and other issues should be viewed as a product of their times.

In other writings, he called Al-Azhar the "other face of the coin of al-Qaida" and called for the university to be dissolved or turned into a secular institution. He also criticized Mubarak, calling him "the symbol of tyranny."

Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a pro-reform blogger who was detained for six weeks last year, said Nabil's conviction will "have a chilling effect on the rest of the bloggers."

"We (the Egyptian people) are enduring oppression, poverty and torture, so the least we can do is insult the president," he said.

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Associated Press Writer Maggie Michael contributed to this report in Cairo.

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On the Net:

Nabil's blog, in Arabic: http://karam903.blogspot.com/