An award winning Canadian journalist shared his nightmare of imprisonment with a packed house in Halifax.
“You don’t have a toilet that flushes so you’re basically improvising to get rid of what’s in the toilet. Many insects, non-stop insects, hundreds of mosquitoes, you kill 50 there’s 50 more. It’s just horrific,” said Mohamed Fahmy, the former bureau chief for Al Jazeera English.
He’s in the city as a special guest for the 35th Atlantic Journalism Awards.
READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: One-on-one with Mohamed Fahmy
Fahmy was granted a pardon by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in September 2015 after spending over 400 days in a maximum security prison.
“I still feel like this is surreal. The very mundane things in life just mean the world to me. We sometimes take freedom for granted and I’m a completely different person now,” said Fahmy.
Fahmy was a dual-citizen of Egypt and Canada and was arrested in Cairo days after taking the bureau chief reins of Al Jazeera English.
He and two of his Al Jazeera colleagues, Australian correspondent Peter Greste and Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed, were arrested on internationally denounced charges of terrorism.
Fahmy was working out of a hotel room in Cairo when he answered a fateful knock at his door.
“I opened the door and it was unbelievable. There were dozens of cops, cameras rolling, a guy taking photos and they all barged in. It too me a little bit to realize what was happening,” said Fahmy.
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He’s now living in Vancouver where he continues to fight suppression of the press through the Fahmy Foundation.
He says the support he received from Canadians during his trial gave him hope for freedom.
“At least 60,000 Canadians signed petitions calling for my release and what Canadians should know is that these petitions really do matter. My lawyer used the petition in front of the judge,” Fahmy said.
“That sent a very clear message that I have a whole continent behind me and that there’s people that believe that I’m no terrorist.”