Bassem Sabry, an Egyptian journalist and commentator who was among those accepting the International Press Institute’s Free Media Pioneer Award at the recent IPI World Congress in South Africa, died April 29th, 2014 in an apparent accident in Cairo. He was 31.
Sabry was widely respected for the reports and commentaries he filed from Cairo on the 2011 Arab Spring and the tumultuous political upheavals that followed. His dispatches appeared in numerous international publications, including Al-Monitor, the Internet news journal that is this year’s recipient of the Free Media Pioneer Award.
The Egyptian journalist reportedly fell off the balcony of a Cairo office building on April 29th, 2014, the website of the Al-Ahram daily reported. Other reports described it as an accident.