Egypt Cut a Licensed Dancer’s Term to Six Months

Cairo’s Economic Court of Appeal cut Italian-Egyptian dancer Linda Martino’s term from one year of hard labor to six months, and kept a 100,000 Egyptian pound fine. The posts at issue sat on an Instagram account the court counted at 2.2 million followers, under the name she uses on stage.

Her legal name in the file is Sohila Tarek Hassan Ali Haggag. Officers stopped her on June 22, 2025 at Cairo airport as she tried to fly to Dubai for work, then ran the case through the economic court as a cybercrime file, not a nightclub raid.

The Airport Stop Was for Videos, Not Cash

Morals police had opened a memo on June 17, 2025, after Col. Ashraf Hashad, head of the women-trafficking unit at the General Administration for the Protection of Public Morals, said clips under the handle linda_martino were spreading online. Brig. Amr Saudi of the same administration collected her that Sunday after airport police flagged the Dubai-bound passenger.

Italian accounts of the stop called the cash on her “substantial” and tied it to vice. The court record is smaller, and specific.

WHAT THEY TOOK AT THE GATE

• The phone: A beige iPhone she said she used to run the accounts.
• The clips: A flash drive the IT lab said held 26 videos of her dancing.
• The cash: 500 Egyptian pounds, 212 US dollars, and 60 UAE dirhams, listed as proceeds of the offense.
• The stills: Five printed frames the morals officers said showed her dancing without underwear.

She told investigators she was flying to Dubai for a job, and that some of the circulating clips had been filmed by guests at private bookings and posted without her. The technical report still matched the woman in those clips to the verified Instagram account, and to a Facebook page the same report put at 222,000 followers.

She Already Held the Syndicate License

In the interrogation room she did not deny the work. She named it, priced it, and listed the paper that is supposed to make it legal.

“I am a show dancer. I work in respectable places. I have permits from the General Administration of Censorship, and I am a member of the Actors’ Syndicate,” she said. “I wear the costume the law sets, and all my work is in licensed places, and all the videos I post on my official page are ordinary, decent dancing.”

She said she left school early, started dancing at 18, went to Italy, studied fashion, married at 19, and came back to Egypt after three years to keep working. Her main income, she said, was the dance itself.

WHAT SHE SAID SHE EARNS

The wedding fee sits just under the fine. The dance she described is the same act hotels and North Coast halls still hire, which is why the file reads so strangely: the state had already issued her the syndicate card, then treated the camera as the offense.

What the Economic Court Counted as Vice

The Cairo Economic Misdemeanors Court, with Judge Sara Ali Hassanein presiding and Judges Hammam Ragab Abdel Azim and Mohamed Khaled Abu Zeid sitting with her, tried the case as a tech-crime file. Prosecutors asked for punishment under Article 166 bis of the Penal Code, Articles 25, 27, and 38 of the 2018 cybercrime statute, and the 2003 telecom law.

The charging window in the reasons is February 3, 2025, and dates before that, in the Fifth Settlement police district. Count one was an attack on “family principles and values” by posting dances in clothes that showed what the judges called “places of her chastity.” Count two was misuse of communications. Count three was creating and using the two accounts to make those offenses easier.

Belly dancing is an art, it cannot be a crime. I am a dancer, and the videos on which the accusations are based are normal; they show a dance performance that does not go against or violate public morality.

Linda Martino, in court after her arrest

The IT lab wrote that the 26 clips showed chest and abdomen and transparent dancewear, and that some were shot in front of a live crowd. She said she did not know the costumes breached social values and denied any intent to seduce. The court acquitted her of Article 27, the website-management count, and convicted her on the first two.

THE CASE CALENDAR

1. June 17, 2025: Morals police open the memo on the linda_martino accounts.
2. June 22, 2025: Officers take her at Cairo airport on a Dubai-bound trip.
3. October 29, 2025: The economic court imposes one year of hard labor with immediate execution, a 100,000-pound fine, and confiscation of the seized phone and cash.
4. December 27, 2025: The Economic Court of Appeal, sitting on a Saturday, cuts the jail term to six months and keeps the fine.

By the appeal date she had already been held for 188 days, which covers a six-month calendar term, though no court paper in this file records a release. The reasons that followed still called the posts “vulgar sexual content” and said art exists “for elevation, not for arousal.”

An Italian Passport Does Not Displace Egyptian Law

She was born in Egypt and holds Italian citizenship through marriage to an Italian businessman. Cairo still treats her as Egyptian. After the June airport arrest that drew Rome in, she asked for the consulate. “I don’t know why Egypt is doing this, but I am also an Italian citizen and at this point I am asking for the Italian consulate to get involved,” she said. The consul in Cairo asked for permission to visit her in detention.

That permission is the tell. The Italian Embassy in Cairo states, in its own civil-status guidance, that local law prevails for dual nationals when the second citizenship is Egyptian. A foreign passport did not pull the file out of the economic court.

Elisabetta Piccolotti, an Italian opposition MP from the AVS party, tied the detention to a longer Italian wound.

The arrest is the latest action against the rights of women and human rights by Sisi’s government. Giulio Regeni already died in those jails, and we cannot downplay the potential consequences of the jailing of this Italian woman who has been accused of violating public morality by a fundamentalist government.

Elisabetta Piccolotti, AVS deputy, after the arrest

Regeni, an Italian doctoral student, disappeared in Cairo in January 2016; his body was found days later. Piccolotti’s comparison is political, not a finding in Martino’s file. The legal fact underneath it is simpler. Egypt never handed the case to Italy.

On Egyptian feeds the passport is also a punchline. One widely shared line in September 2026 put her in Sharabeya, a Cairo district, and treated the Italian name as a billing choice. The court did not bother with that argument. It used the Egyptian name on the docket and the stage name on the accounts, and kept both.

Koshari Reached UNESCO Without the Dance

While the appeal sat, Cairo was busy putting food on a heritage list. In December 2025 the culture ministry announced that UNESCO had placed kushari on UNESCO’s heritage list, the eleventh Egyptian entry on the intangible list. Oriental dance was not on that list.

Amie Sultan, a Cairo dancer and former ballerina who runs the Taqseem Institute she founded in 2022, has spent years trying to move the form, which she prefers to call baladi, off the nightclub stigma and toward theatres and a UNESCO file. The institute has a certification from UNESCO’s International Dance Council. That is a school badge, not an inscription of the dance itself.

Italian reporting on Martino’s arrest noted that the crackdown ran against that heritage campaign, and put the recent tally at five dancers in five years. Sultan’s project and Martino’s Instagram are not the same trade. One is a classroom arguing for archives and musicality. The other is a North Coast booking that pays 80,000 pounds a wedding and lives on a phone. The state has room for the first in a brochure. It used Article 25 on the second.

Morality Police Are Still Booking Dancers

Martino’s file is one sheet in a thicker stack. Human Rights Watch, in its Egypt chapter of World Report 2026, wrote that authorities detained and prosecuted dozens of social media influencers in a campaign that began in July 2025, aimed mainly at women, on morality charges. Between late July and late August the group counted 29 online content creators, including 19 women and one child, then 21 more prosecutions in October. The charge sheet keeps repeating the same phrases: public morals, family values, money laundering.

THE 2025 CREATOR SWEEP

• The statute: Article 25 of Law 175 of 2018, “violation of family principles or values,” carries six months to three years in prison and heavy fines.
• The dancers: Interior statements in that wave named four other belly dancers, Badiaa, an Egyptian-Italian performer, Noura Denial, Boosi al-Asad, and Doosa.
• The private complainant: Lawyer Ashraf Farhat, founder of a campaign called Purify Society, has filed serial morals complaints against dancers and TikTok women; in February 2025 an economic court fined him 20,000 pounds over an unlicensed-organization case of his own.

A former Cairo Opera House ballet dancer, Basant Rahmy, spent 2026 in the Ismailia Economic Court on the same family-values and social-media charge after an officer pulled about 25 videos from her accounts. She told the court people had mistaken her for a belly dancer. The distinction did not keep the economic court out of a ballet file.

Fan pages were still posting Martino’s stage clips in September 2026, months after the appeal. The economic court had already written those moves down as an attack on the Egyptian family. The videos did not come off the internet. The license did not keep her off the docket. The Italian passport did not move the trial. The dance, in the halls that still pay 80,000 pounds a night, went on without her name on the card.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Linda Martino’s Legal Name in Egyptian Court Records?

The economic court caption uses Sohila Tarek Hassan Ali Haggag, also written سهيلة طارق حسن علي حجاج, with the stage name Linda Martino attached as an alias. Egyptian papers also bill her as the North Coast dancer, a nickname from wedding and cabaret work on the coast, and the technical report noted a verification badge on the Instagram account the judges tied to that alias.

What Penalty Does Article 25 of Egypt’s Cybercrime Law Carry?

Human Rights Watch describes Article 25 of Law 175 of 2018 as a charge of violating family principles or values in Egyptian society, punishable by six months to three years in prison plus large fines. Martino’s 100,000-pound fine sits at the top of the band lawyers quote for that article, which is 50,000 to 100,000 pounds, and she was acquitted of the separate Article 27 count of creating and managing a site.

Does Italy’s Embassy Get Full Access When Cairo Claims Dual Nationals?

No automatic access. Egypt’s Nationality Law No. 26 of 1975 lets an Egyptian hold a second passport only with interior-ministry permission, and in any event still treats a person born Egyptian as Egyptian on Egyptian soil. The Italian Embassy in Cairo tells dual Italian-Egyptian citizens that Egyptian law governs their status inside the country, which is why the consul had to ask to visit rather than walk in.

Is Belly Dance Itself Illegal in Egyptian Venues?

No. Martino told prosecutors she was registered with the Actors’ Syndicate and with the state film-and-performance censors, and that she works in licensed rooms in the costume those rules allow. The conviction attached to posting and broadcasting, not to the existence of a paid wedding slot, which is why a dancer can still be hired for 80,000 pounds at a reception and jailed for a clip of the same night.