Cairo court confirms death sentences for presenter Sarah Khalifa and 11 others in synthetic-drug case

A Cairo Criminal Court on 5 September confirmed death sentences by hanging for television presenter Sarah Khalifa and 11 co-defendants in a synthetic-drug case that began with arrests in April 2025. The court had sent the capital files to Egypt's Grand Mufti in August, as the law requires. The mufti's opinion is advisory. The bench then listed the sentences on Saturday.

State newspaper Al-Ahram said the 12 were convicted of forming an organised gang that imported materials used to make narcotics, manufactured the drugs for sale, and held unlicensed firearms and ammunition. Akhbar Al-Youm, also state-run, said the group imported the raw chemicals from abroad. Investigators reported a seizure of more than 750 kilograms of finished drugs and feedstock and the discovery of two apartments used as laboratories.

The dock held 28 people. Nine received life terms. Seven were acquitted. Gulf News and Ahram Online both recorded that split. Two defendants remain at large and are on travel watch lists, The National reported. Khalifa, 39, was arrested in Cairo in April 2025 under a warrant dated 17 April.

She is known for Mission Impossible, a programme that covered crime and security cases. She also owns a cosmetic surgery clinic and an events company. She has denied the charges. Akhbar Al-Youm reported that, when a judge asked her about her role last September, she said she had never seen drugs until she was photographed with them inside the anti-narcotics offices.

Prosecutors alleged a division of labour. Some defendants bought chemicals overseas. Others ran production and distribution. Court coverage said Khalifa was accused of putting up money and of travelling to meet two alleged organisers. Those claims are now part of a verdict that can still be taken to the Court of Cassation, Egypt's highest criminal court. Counsel has 30 days from the written reasons, according to Al-Rai's legal sources.

Al-Rai also reported a second judgment the same day: three years' hard labour for Khalifa in a separate case in which she was accused of filming and sexually assaulting her driver in her home. Other defendants in that file received seven years and one year. That case is distinct from the drug file and will travel on its own appeal path.

Egypt uses the death penalty for certain drug-trafficking offences. Confirmation after a mufti referral is the last trial-court step, not the last legal step. Cassation can quash on procedure or evidence. Until that court rules, the sentences are not carried out. Human rights groups have long argued that capital drug cases in Egypt rest on contested confessions and on laboratory claims that defence lawyers cannot fully test. Those arguments will be filed again here. They are not yet adjudicated.

The volume cited, 750 kilograms, is large enough to keep the case on the interior ministry's public list of "major" narcotics files. What the first-day coverage does not supply is a complete chain from the imported drums to the two apartments to each of the 12 condemned. That chain, if it exists in the written judgment, is what Cassation will read.

For Egyptian television the immediate fact is that a presenter who built a career on crime stories is now herself under sentence of death in a crime case she says was staged around a photograph. The court has given its answer. The higher court has not.