The Egyptian security services have arrested 11 people suspected of having "invented" information on behalf of the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera in order to "endanger the security of the country," the Interior Ministry announced on Friday.
The individuals arrested were collaborating with the Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood to disseminate information, including a documentary on the unstable region of Sinai (east), in exchange for large sums of money, said in a statement the ministry.
It was a question of "undermining national security and stability by inventing news (...) on the internal situation of the country in order to spread rumors (...)".
Egyptian security forces have been trying for years to contain an insurgency in the northern Sinai Peninsula, in which a local group affiliated with the Islamic State (IS) organization takes part.
Al-Jazeera has been at the center of a political dispute between Cairo and Doha since the military overthrow in 2013 of the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood and supported by Qatar.
The Egyptian government sees Al-Jazeera as the voice of the brotherhood - classified as a “prohibited organization” since 2013 -, and its site is blocked, and only accessible through a VPN (virtual private network), in Egypt since 2017 .
In 2013, three journalists from this channel were arrested and then sentenced to three years in prison for "disseminating false information" supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, before being released in 2015.
Egyptian authorities have imprisoned thousands of supporters of Mohamed Morsi as part of a crackdown on dissent that also targets liberal and secular activists, bloggers, artists and journalists.
In June 2017, Cairo joined forces with three Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain) to freeze diplomatic relations with Qatar, accused of supporting extremist Islamist movements.
Since then, Doha, which denies the accusations, has been subjected to a strict economic boycott and there are no longer any direct links with Egypt.