A Cairo criminal court sentenced Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa to death by hanging on September 5, 2026. Ten days later she walked into the same courthouse and signed her appeal, leaving the verdict against a well-known broadcaster far from final.
The court convicted Khalifa and 11 co-defendants on drug charges and sentenced all 12 to death, two of them tried in absentia. Of the 28 people referred to trial, nine others received life sentences and seven were acquitted. Khalifa has denied every accusation since her arrest on April 20, 2025, at a luxury apartment in the Fifth Settlement district of New Cairo.
Her lawyer, Mohamed El Gendy, said after the verdict that the defense would contest the conviction, citing 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.” The 12 sentenced to death were each also fined 500,000 Egyptian pounds, about $9,700, and the assets in the presenter’s account were placed under precautionary measures. She remains in custody.
A Two-Stage Path Through the Courts
Under Law No. 1 of 2024, in force since January, a capital defendant in Egypt has two avenues left: a retrial before an appeals court, and only after that a challenge at the Court of Cassation. Khalifa took the first of them on September 15, appearing at the New Cairo court in the Fifth Settlement alongside 20 other defendants to sign the appeal against the death and life sentences. No hearing date has been set.
Nothing was decided in August, despite reports to the contrary — on August 4 the court referred the papers of 13 defendants to Egypt’s grand mufti, the procedural signal of an intended death sentence. One of the 13 did not receive one when the verdict came. The law requires judges to seek that religious opinion whenever capital punishment is at stake, and it binds them to nothing.
What Prosecutors Told the Court
Judges found that the defendants had formed an organized criminal group, importing chemicals, producing synthetic narcotics inside Egypt and trafficking them along with unlicensed firearms and ammunition. More than 750 kilograms (1,653 pounds) of narcotics and raw materials were seized, the Interior Ministry said, among them a synthetic cannabinoid known in Egypt as El Bodra, meaning “the powder.” Two residential flats had been fitted out as makeshift laboratories.
Prosecutors said three men ran the network and that two of them were abroad and tried in their absence. They also cast Khalifa as its manager, financier and dealmaker, and the link between members inside Egypt and outside it, alleging she used her companies as a front for moving money. Her brother Mohamed was among those sentenced to death, on charges of manufacturing and testing the drugs. Twenty witnesses gave statements, and the case drew as well on digital material, conversations and video clips.
Khalifa rejects the entire case. She told investigators she had never so much as smoked, and says she first laid eyes on the drugs when she was photographed with them at the offices of the anti-narcotics authority. Video from the hearing spread on social media, showing her in tears as she addressed the judges. “Please listen to me, sir. 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 made her name as host of “Mohemma Saaba,” or “A Difficult Mission,” a program on security and crime that began airing in 2015 on the private channel Al-Mehwar. Produced in cooperation with the Interior Ministry, it ran about four years. Her career stretched nearly two decades across Egyptian, Saudi and Iraqi channels, and she drew more than two million Instagram followers. Off camera she ran a cosmetic surgery clinic and an events and production company. Egypt’s media syndicate has said she was never registered or licensed to work as a presenter.
Her age is itself disputed. International reports describe her as 39; Egyptian profiles, as the state-run Ahram Online notes, give her date of birth as March 29, 1994, which would make her 32. She was briefly married in 2016 to the Egyptian footballer Mahmoud Abdel Moneim, known as Kahraba, who has since referred to it as a marriage that was never completed.
The same court sentenced her on September 5 in a second case, to three years for the unlawful detention of her private driver in October 2021. She and a co-defendant were acquitted of indecently assaulting the driver and filming him; two other men were convicted of that and sentenced to seven years each.
Debate Over Egypt’s Death Penalty
The conviction of a familiar television personality has gripped Egypt and set off a wide public dispute, with commenters demanding the evidence be laid out in full before any sentence is carried out and the bulk of the online reaction calling the punishment excessive.
Premeditated murder, terrorism, some rape offenses and drug trafficking all carry capital punishment in Egypt. Amnesty International, in a report published in May on the previous year, counted 492 death sentences in the country during 2025 and said 23 executions were carried out, up from 13 the year before. Some defendants, the rights group said, had been condemned for crimes that did not amount to intentional killing, the threshold to which it says the death penalty must be restricted under international law. The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms put the 2025 tally of death sentences higher still, at 541.
Khalifa’s conviction is a first-instance verdict. Her appeal is lodged and awaiting a hearing, and she continues to maintain her innocence.
