A Cairo criminal court sentenced Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa to death on Saturday, September 5, 2026, and her lawyer says she will fight it — leaving the sentence against the well-known broadcaster far from final.
The court convicted Khalifa, 39, and 11 other defendants on drug charges and sentenced them to death by hanging. Nine co-defendants received life sentences, and seven of the 28 people charged in the case were acquitted. Since police arrested her in an upmarket district of Cairo in April 2025, she has denied every accusation. The death sentence also carries a fine of 500,000 Egyptian pounds (about $9,800), Egyptian state-owned outlet Al-Ahram Gate reported on September 9.
Procedural legal errors during the trial will form the basis of the defense’s challenge to the conviction, according to Mohamed El Gendy, her lawyer, who spoke on Sunday, September 6. The ruling, El Gendy said, would be “as if it never existed and it will be cancelled at the appeal stage before reaching cassation.” No filing of that promised appeal had been reported as of September 9.
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 could not pronounce the sentence until they had sought a religious advisory opinion from Egypt’s grand mufti, a step that binds no one but that the law requires whenever the death penalty is at stake. The verdict in the drugs case was first announced a month earlier; the Cairo Criminal Court referred Khalifa’s papers to the grand mufti and confirmed the sentence on September 5 only once his opinion had come back.
What Prosecutors Told the Court
An organized criminal group had been formed by the defendants, the court found, and it imported chemicals from abroad, manufactured synthetic narcotics inside Egypt and trafficked those drugs alongside unlicensed firearms and ammunition. Investigators seized more than 750 kilograms (about 1,650 pounds) of narcotics and raw materials, 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, according to the ministry.
Prosecutors said three men were running the network, two of them abroad and tried in absentia, with members assigned separate tasks covering the purchase of materials, their manufacture and their sale. Khalifa, they told the court in closing arguments, ran the group, covered its costs, arranged its deals and served as the link between members inside Egypt and those outside it. She had used her companies as a front for moving money, they alleged, and the operation began in an Asian country and ended in Egypt. The danger posed by the network, the unusual shape of the scheme and the scale of the damage it caused all justified the harshest sentence available, they argued.
Beyond statements from 20 witnesses, prosecutors leaned on digital evidence, among it chat exchanges and video clips.
Khalifa denies all of it. She has not even been a smoker, she told investigators, and she says the drugs in the case came into her view for the first time when she was photographed with them at the offices of the anti-narcotics authority. Footage from the hearing spread across social media and showed her in tears as she addressed the judges. Local reports cited on September 9 said she told the court she was suffering from a tumor, and that she cried as she pleaded for “mercy and humanity” during the sentencing. “My parents raised me well; they are people who pray, and I don’t need drug money,” she told the court. In a video circulating on social media from her September 5 sentencing hearing at Cairo Criminal Court, she said: “I swear to Almighty God, with the strongest oath, that I have been wronged.” A September 9 report said she “screamed” the words “I have never smoked a cigarette in my life.”
From Crime Show Host to Defendant
Khalifa became a household name in Egypt as host of “Mission Impossible.” The private channel Al-Mehwar began carrying the program, which dealt with security and crime issues, in 2015. Produced in cooperation with the Interior Ministry, the show ran for about four years.
She worked for nearly two decades on Egyptian, Saudi, and Iraqi channels and built a large following online; a September 9 report put her Instagram audience at 2.6 million. Off camera, she ran a cosmetic surgery clinic and an events and production company. In 2016 she was briefly married to the Egyptian footballer Mahmoud Abdel Moneim, known as Kahraba.
On September 5 the same court also handed Khalifa a three-year prison sentence in a separate case, for assaulting and filming her driver. A third case concerned the kidnapping and assault of a young man; the judges gave Khalifa and her co-defendants five-year prison terms in that matter.
Debate Over Egypt’s Death Penalty
The conviction of a familiar television personality on drug charges has seized attention across Egypt and touched off a broad public argument. Many commenters are calling for fuller disclosure of the evidence against the presenter before anyone carries out a sentence, and the bulk of the online response has cast the punishment as too severe.
Premeditated murder, terrorism, some rape offenses and drug trafficking can all bring capital punishment in Egypt. Egyptian courts handed down 492 death sentences over the course of that year, Amnesty International’s 2025 report recorded, and 23 of them were carried out. 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 counted 541 death sentences issued in Egypt in 2025.
She continues to maintain her innocence, and the first-instance verdict against her remains open to challenge.