A Cairo criminal court condemned Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa to death by hanging on Saturday, September 5, 2026, in a major drug case — and her lawyer says the verdict against the well-known broadcaster is nowhere near final, because the defense intends to appeal.
The court convicted Khalifa, 39, and 11 other defendants on drug charges, then sentenced all 12 of them to death by hanging. Nine co-defendants received life sentences, while seven of the 28 people charged in the case were acquitted. Since her arrest in April 2025 in an upmarket district of Cairo, Khalifa has denied every accusation against her.
Cairo’s Criminal Court also imposed a financial penalty on the group facing execution, fining each of the 12 defendants sentenced to death 500,000 Egyptian pounds ($13,600).
As of September 8, authorities had placed restrictions on the defendants’ assets and bank accounts, and those defendants already behind bars were ordered to remain in custody.
The defense will challenge the conviction on the basis of what it calls procedural legal errors during the trial, her lawyer, Mohamed El Gendy, said 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.”
As of September 8, the defense had also challenged the arrest and search procedures, the forensic findings and the classification of the seized substances. Dr. Mohamed Hamouda, another lawyer on Khalifa’s defense team, sought to reopen arguments after a court-appointed technical committee submitted its findings.
A Two-Stage Path Through the Courts
Recent judicial reforms leave a capital defendant in Egypt two routes to fight a verdict: a request for a retrial before an appeals court, and after that a challenge at the Court of Cassation. Before the judges pronounced the sentence, they had to seek a religious advisory opinion from Egypt’s grand mufti — a step with no binding force that the law requires in every case where execution is on the table. The verdict was first announced a month earlier and only confirmed on September 5 after the court obtained the grand mufti’s opinion.
What Prosecutors Told the Court
The convictions rested on findings that the defendants formed an organized criminal group, importing chemicals from abroad, manufacturing synthetic narcotics inside Egypt and trafficking them along with 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, the ministry said, had been fitted out as makeshift laboratories.
Three men ran the network, according to prosecutors, two of them abroad and tried in absentia, with members handed separate tasks covering the purchase of materials, their manufacture and their sale. In closing arguments, prosecutors told the court that the group had been run and financed by Khalifa, who arranged its deals. She also served, they said, as the link between members inside Egypt and outside it. They alleged she had used her companies as a front for moving money, and said the operation began in an Asian country and ended in Egypt. Citing the gravity of the threat, the unfamiliar nature of the pattern and the extent of the harm, they asked for the harshest sentence available.
Judge Abdel-Monsef Ismail Mahmoud presided over the panel, sitting with judges Essam Ahmed Bakkar and Seddik Mohamed Refki. Mahmoud El-Sanousi, representing the Public Prosecution, argued that the seized substances fell within the legally prohibited category and sought death by hanging in the proceedings widely dubbed the “Grand Drug Case.” Khalifa, whose full name is given as Sarah Khalifa Hamada, was defended by a team that included Hamouda alongside El Gendy.
Digital material, including conversations and video clips, formed part of the case as well, alongside the statements Prosecutors took from 20 witnesses.
Khalifa denies all of it. She told investigators that she had not so much as been a smoker, and by her account she laid eyes on the drugs in the case for the first time when she was photographed with them at the offices of the anti-narcotics authority. Footage from the hearing showed her in tears as she spoke to the judges, and it circulated on social media. “My parents raised me well; they are people who pray, and I don’t need drug money,” she told the court. In a video shared online, she asked for “mercy and humanity” and said: “I swear to Almighty God, with the strongest oath, that I have been wronged.”
From Crime Show Host to Defendant
Egyptian viewers came to know Khalifa through “Mission Impossible,” a program devoted to security and crime issues that the private channel Al-Mehwar began airing 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, hosted an entertainment show with musician Hamo Bika, and drew a large online audience of 2.6 million Instagram followers. Off camera, her businesses included 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.
The same court handed her three years in prison on September 5 in a separate case, for assaulting and filming her driver. Another case, involving the kidnapping and assault of a young man, ended in five-year prison terms for her and other defendants.
Debate Over Egypt’s Death Penalty
Attention has fixed on the case across Egypt, where the drug conviction of a familiar television personality has set off a wide public argument. Commenters have pressed for fuller disclosure of the evidence against the presenter before any sentence is carried out, and the bulk of the online reaction has cast the punishment as excessive.
Premeditated murder, terrorism, some rape offenses and drug trafficking can all draw capital punishment in Egypt. Amnesty International’s 2025 report recorded 492 death sentences in the country during that year, and authorities carried out 23 of them. 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. A higher tally came from the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, which put the number of death sentences issued in Egypt in 2025 at 541.
Khalifa continues to maintain her innocence, and the ruling against her is a first-instance verdict that remains open to challenge.