FRANCE 24 journalist assaulted in Cairo

FRANCE 24 journalist Sonia Dridi filed a police complaint with Egyptian police on Saturday, a day after she was assaulted while reporting on a protest in the capital Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Dridi had just finished giving a live news report at around 10:30pm on Friday for FRANCE 24’s French language television when a crowd of men teemed around her, shoving and grabbing at her body.

“I was surrounded by my team, so I didn’t feel like I was in any particular danger,” Dridi told FRANCE 24 in a televised interview, saying that the camera crew had attracted a crowd of curious bystanders. “I was able to do my live report but at the end of it the atmosphere was really tense.”

“The crowd encircled us…It was mostly young men, but not only. They started to touch me and I held onto my colleague, who tried to reassure me and hold my attention so we could get out of the crowd as fast as possible,” Dridi added.

After a tense few moments, Ashraf Khalil, a correspondent for FRANCE 24’s English language television, was eventually able to rescue Dridi from the crowd.

On Saturday, FRANCE 24 announced that both journalists were safe and in good health. In a statement, the company also said that it “firmly condemns repeated acts of violence against journalists, who should be able to do their job freely anywhere in the world”.

It is far from the first time that a female journalist has been sexually assaulted while working in Cairo. Last year a number of women reported having been attacked while covering mass protests against former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.