Egyptian anti-government activist Mohammed el-Sharkawi, who spent most of the past three months in jail, accused the government on Wednesday of a distortion campaign against the country's pro-democracy protest movement.
He said the campaign, combined with a spate of arrests at street protests in recent months, was taking a toll on turnout. But he vowed that protests would continue. "There is a distortion campaign. For example, (they say) these people are financed from abroad, or they are communists, or unbelievers," Sharkawi said in an interview, a week after his release from Egypt's Tora prison. "Of course it succeeded," he said. "It made the people sort of say: 'Who are these people?' ... It affected us a little bit."
Sharkawi, a 24-year-old member of the Kefaya protest movement who was a regular at street protests, was picked up as he tried to leave a small demonstration in May and detained on charges including insulting President Hosni Mubarak.
That arrest came just three days after he was freed from a month-long detention following his arrest in April at a demonstration supporting Egyptian judges in their demands for greater independence from the executive.
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