Journalist detained, residence searched over reporting on French state protection secrets and techniques, information outlet says

PARIS — A French journalist was arrested and her residence searched Tuesday by the nation’s home intelligence company, her employer the investigative information outlet Disclose, mentioned.

Disclose mentioned reporter Ariane Lavrilleux’s detention was linked to her reporting on leaked paperwork implicating French intelligence’s alleged function within the Egyptian authorities’s concentrating on of civilians.

The media outlet referred to as the detention an “unacceptable” assault on press freedoms.

The Common Directorate of Inner Safety opened an investigation in July 2022 into Disclose’s work, which it mentioned was “compromising nationwide protection secrets and techniques and revealing data that would result in the identification of a protected agent.”

The allegations stem from a collection of exposés initiated in November 2021 by which Disclose chronicled the alleged misuse of French navy intelligence by the Egyptian navy in an operation initially meant to establish Islamic militants.

The scope of Operation Sirli allegedly expanded to facilitate almost 20 focused strikes carried out by the Egyptian navy in opposition to people returning to Egypt from Libya between 2016 and 2018 who had been suspected of smuggling. However subsequent studies mentioned a lot of these focused weren’t militants, a extreme breach in protocols relating to the concentrating on of civilians and evoking potential human rights violations.

In a put up on the platform X, previously often called Twitter, Disclose mentioned that its reporting “relied on a number of hundred prime secret paperwork to unveil a marketing campaign of arbitrary executions” orchestrated by Egyptian chief Abdel Fattah el-Sissi “with the complicity of the French state.”

Tuesday’s arrest was prone to intensify scrutiny and immediate questions in French media over the nation’s alleged function in and file on human rights in Egypt.