Mahmoud Abu Zeid "Shawkan" (Egyptian photojournalist; 2018 UNESCO Press Freedom laureate) — from his April 2015 letter smuggled out of Tora prison (Amnesty International): his account of being arrested on 14 Aug 2013 simply for photographing the Rabaa dispersal — jailed 5½ years for "taking pictures."

My life changed forever on the morning of Wednesday 14 August 2013. I was taking pictures of people protesting on the streets of Cairo when police came and locked down the streets. Thousands of people were immediately arrested – not only Morsi supporters, but also dozens of people caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was like a Hollywood movie. It felt like we were in the middle of a war.

[content_original is verbatim from Shawkan's own April 2015 letter, smuggled out of Tora prison and published by Amnesty International ("600 days in jail for taking pictures"), the cited source_url; tier-2, confirmed verbatim (dash/quote glyphs normalized). As published by Amnesty in English (the letter may have been translated from Arabic).] Testimony of Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known as SHAWKAN — an Egyptian photojournalist arrested on 14 August 2013 while photographing the security forces' violent dispersal of the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in (the deadliest mass killing of protesters in modern Egyptian history). Here he recounts being swept up and detained simply for documenting the events. He was held for 5½ years (much of it in pretrial detention), faced possible death-penalty charges in a mass trial of ~700 defendants, described indefinite detention as "psychologically unbearable," and won the 2018 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize while still imprisoned; he was released on 4 March 2019. This is the PHOTOJOURNALIST / VISUAL-WITNESS PRESS-FREEDOM cell — the criminalization of bearing visual witness to state violence, a distinct facet of free expression (the camera as the target), complementing the writers and bloggers (Patrick Zaki, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Shireen Abu Akleh) already in the dataset. [Axes: civil-liberties / press freedom (photojournalism; documenting state violence; against the criminalization of journalism; arbitrary detention), regime-stance (against the post-2013 crackdown and the Rabaa dispersal), accountability (bearing witness to mass killing).]