A Cairo criminal court sentenced Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa to death by hanging on Saturday, September 5, 2026, and her lawyer said she will appeal, leaving the verdict against the well-known broadcaster far from final.
Khalifa, 39, was condemned along with 11 other defendants after the court convicted them on drug charges. The court handed life sentences to nine co-defendants and acquitted seven of the 28 people charged. Since her arrest in April 2025 in an upmarket district of Cairo, Khalifa has denied every accusation against her.
Mohamed El Gendy, her lawyer, said on Sunday, September 6, that the defense would attack the conviction over what he described as procedural legal errors during the trial. The ruling, El Gendy said, would be “as if it never existed and it will be cancelled at the appeal stage before reaching cassation.”
Each of the 12 defendants sentenced to death, Khalifa among them, was also ordered to pay a fine of EGP 500,000, and the assets in the TV host’s account were placed “under precautionary measures.” As of September 8, Khalifa is to remain in custody while the ruling is appealed.
A Two-Stage Path Through the Courts
Recent judicial reforms give a capital defendant in Egypt two routes of appeal: a request for a retrial before an appeals court, then a challenge at the Court of Cassation. Judges first announced the verdict in the drugs case in August 2026, and it was confirmed only a month later, on the court’s receipt of the religious advisory opinion of Egypt’s grand mufti — a step the law mandates whenever the death penalty is at stake, though the opinion carries no binding force.
What Prosecutors Told the Court
The court found that the defendants had formed an organized criminal group which imported chemicals from abroad, produced synthetic narcotics inside Egypt and trafficked them along with unlicensed firearms and ammunition. The Interior Ministry said the seizures amounted to more than 750 kilograms (about 1,650 pounds) of raw materials and narcotics, including a synthetic cannabinoid known in Egypt as El Bodra, meaning “the powder.” Two residential flats, the ministry said, had been fitted out as makeshift laboratories.
Three men ran the network, prosecutors said, two of them abroad and tried in absentia, with each member handling a separate task — buying materials, manufacturing them or selling them. Two of the defendants in the case have not yet been taken into custody and were placed on travel bans and watchlists, as of September 8. In their closing arguments, prosecutors cast Khalifa as the group’s leader and financier, the fixer of its deals and the link between members inside Egypt and outside it. Her companies, they alleged, served as a front for moving money, and the operation began in an Asian country and ended in Egypt. They asked for the harshest sentence available, citing the extent of the harm, the gravity of the threat and the unfamiliar nature of the pattern. Khalifa’s brother, Mohamed, is also reportedly facing death for the testing and manufacturing of the drugs.
Prosecutors gathered statements from 20 witnesses and leaned as well on digital material, including conversations and video clips.
Khalifa rejects all of it. She told investigators she had never even been a smoker, and she says she had not laid eyes on the drugs in the case until she was photographed with them inside the anti-narcotics authority’s offices. Video from the hearing spread on social media, showing her in tears as she addressed the judges. “My parents raised me well; they are people who pray, and I don’t need drug money,” she told the court.
From Crime Show Host to Defendant
Khalifa built her name in Egypt on “Mission Impossible,” a program devoted to security and crime issues that the private channel Al-Mehwar began airing in 2015. Made in cooperation with the Interior Ministry, it ran for about four years.
She worked nearly two decades on Egyptian, Saudi, and Iraqi channels and drew a wide audience online, with 2.6 million Instagram followers. Off camera she ran a cosmetic surgery clinic and an events and production company. In 2016 she married the Egyptian footballer Mahmoud Abdel Moneim, known as Kahraba; the marriage was brief.
In a separate case on September 5, the same court sentenced her to three years in prison for sexually assaulting and filming her driver; she was accused of filming him naked, allegedly in an effort to make him confess to giving authorities information on a drug case. A third case, over the kidnapping and assault of a young man, brought five-year prison terms for her and other defendants.
The Argument Over Egypt’s Death Penalty
The case has gripped Egypt, where a familiar television personality’s conviction on drug charges has set off a broad public argument. Online, most of the reaction has framed the punishment as excessive, and commenters have demanded fuller disclosure of the evidence against the presenter before any sentence is carried out.
Premeditated murder, terrorism, some rape offenses and drug trafficking all carry capital punishment in Egypt. In its 2025 report, Amnesty International counted 492 death sentences in the country over the course of that year, 23 of them carried out, and said that defendants had been condemned for crimes falling short of intentional killing — the threshold to which it says international law must confine the death penalty. The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms put the number of death sentences issued in Egypt in 2025 at 541.
Khalifa continues to maintain her innocence, and the ruling against her is a first-instance verdict that remains open to challenge.
