Interior Ministry’s lack of transparency over Wahat attacks gave rise to false reports

Beating up on the foreign press: The Interior Ministry’s slowness in releasing information about the Wahat attack left room for rumors and false reports, a prominent columnist writes, but the real bad guys in are international media outlets that have run casualty figures that don’t square with official totals. In a not-so-veiled reference to BBC and Reuters’ coverage of the incident, Emad El Din Hussein writes for Al Shorouk that claims of a higher death toll should be backed up with the victims’ names. Youm7’s Karim Abdel Salam and Dandarawy El Hawary, meanwhile, called out the two outlets directly, saying they should be held — legally — accountable for their alleged false reporting and the “chaos” it created. El Hawary claims that both outlets have published false news before.