A report by The Canadian Press Tuesday indicated that Mr. Harper had in fact spoken with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi about Mr. Fahmy’s case, but the former CNN reporter shot back that the Conservative Leader should have been more transparent about his efforts.
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“Sitting in that prison cell, it was hard not to feel betrayed and abandoned by Prime Minister Harper”, Fahmy said at a news conference two days after returning to Canada.
Fahmy met Liberal leader Justin Trudeau on Monday and was due to meet New Democrat leader Thomas Mulcair later on Tuesday, but said that he was not going to endorse either one.
“You do know who I am not voting for”.
“There are no words to describe how it feels when you are wrongly convicted and sitting in a cold cell, infested with insects, nurturing a broken shoulder”, he told reporters. “But when you’re there, your only hope is that your prime minister would do everything in his power to get you out of there”.
His arrival ends a almost two-year ordeal that raised questions about Egypt’s commitment to free speech and whether Canada’s Conservative government did enough to help him. He was released after spending roughly a year in jail, only to be sentenced to three more years behind bars in August 2015 following a retrial.
“In the Middle East right now, the political turmoil is intense and others could be in my situation”, he added.
Fahmy said that he had arrived in Toronto with his wife on Sunday and had long imagined that moment when in prison.
Fahmy was serving as Al Jazeera’s acting bureau chief in Cairo when he was arrested in 2013 along with two colleagues, Australian journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed.
Fahmy received a pardon in September.
He also plans to take up a position as an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia’s school of journalism in Vancouver, and is writing a book about his experiences. “Canada is the best place to do that”.
Fahmy has launched the Fahmy Foundation to advocate for press freedom and the release of imprisoned journalists.
Fahmy also addressed his lawsuit against his former employer Al Jazeera, saying, “no news service should be able to compromise … the safety” of its journalists.
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“Analysts have pointed to the fact that he was not in Egypt during the time of the President Sisi’s decision as the reason for being left out of the extensive list of pardons: “[A pardon] would mean all the difference in the world.
