Egypt court spares Jazeera producer jail term

CAIRO, Feb 11 (Reuters) - An Egyptian court overturned on Monday a six-month prison sentence imposed on an Al Jazeera producer caught with tapes for a feature on police torture.

The appeals court in the north Cairo suburb of Heliopolis overruled the conviction of producer Huweida Taha Metwalli on a charge of damaging Egypt's national interests and waived the 10,000-pound fine ($1,800) which a lower court imposed last May.

But the court upheld her conviction on another charge related to the tapes and maintained a separate fine of 20,000 pounds.

The producer was arrested in January 2007 while the Qatar-based Arabic television channel was collecting material for the feature, including recordings of real torture incidents and reconstructed torture scenes using actors.

The conviction upheld was for "possessing TV tapes, with the aim of distributing and broadcasting them, which included events contrary to reality about torture in Egypt, and which are likely to damage the reputation of the country abroad".

Jazeera's Cairo bureau chief, Hussein Abdel Ghani, said he could not comment on the verdict itself but that threats of imprisonment and excessive fines were like a sword hanging over the freedom of the press in Egypt.

"Any just judge, any responsible authority that respects the freedom of the press must abolish these punishments," he added.

Egyptian journalists and rights groups have been campaigning for years for the abolition of custodial sentences for publishing offences but the penalties remain on the books.

Egyptian courts sentenced four well-known editors to one year in jail for publishing offences last year but the editors remain free pending appeals.

Jazeera started work on the feature after the release of secretly recorded scenes of abuse and torture threw new light on Egyptian police brutality against detainees and suspects.

One of the best known recordings, widely circulated on the Internet, was of bus driver Emad el-Kabir being sodomised with a stick. In November two Cairo policemen were sentenced to three years in jail for their role in the abuse.

Human rights groups say torture is standard practice in the interrogations at Egyptian police stations. The authorities say cases are exceptional and they prosecute offenders. ($1 = 5.51 Egyptian pounds) (Writing by Jonathan Wright; Editing by Charles Dick)