Free Alaa! - Update Alaa released

UPDATE: Alaa has been released and is on his way home.

One is always very ambivalent about this,one is of course happy, but also extremely frustrated, it shouldn´t be happening in the first place... Welcome home Alaa!

Epilogue

This is Alaa´s own words on what happend at Cairo airport, hopefully the end of the story.

Original post - Free Alaa!

Alaa Seif of manalaa.net , blogger extraordinaire and one of the kindest people around in the blogosphere has been detained at cairo Airport, upon arrival from his current home in South Africa.

"Blogger Alaa seif was detained at the airport, & is being transferred to a police station, on charges of evading a sentence over a bad check" (Sandmonkey)

The latest is that he´s still being held at the airport, and not yet transfered to a police station.

Alaa tweeted upon arrival at Cairo Airport and you can follow those tweets, and hopefully he´s tweeting upon release... here

Of course this is not the first time for Alaa to have to deal with this nonsense, the banner used in this blog post, is recycled, it was first used in a campaign to release Alaa and a group of 47 other activists in the early summer of 2006, then he was released after 45 days in Tora prison.

Alaa & Manal and many other bloggers and Human Rights organizations was involved in a marathon case feauturing judge Abdel Fattah Mourad,were the judge tried to block 50 websites after he had been caught with plaugerism of one of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) publications. A case that was more kafkaesque than any other case involving bloggers, perhaps apart from Kareem´s four year prison sentence, and ANHRI opens up for the possibility that this current case might be related to that in some way. If that´s the case i´m not the least surprised.

Here´s an old profile on Youth for Change in the form of an interview with Alaa and Manal.

Free Alaa!