Mahmoud, a reporter for the newspaper Al-Ta'awun, was shot on January 29 as antigovernment protests in Cairo turned violent. His wife, Inas Abdel-Alim, told Al-Jazeera that her husband had stepped on to his office balcony to record video of a confrontation between security forces and demonstrators on the street when security forces spotted him.
Abdel-Alim said that several witnesses told her a uniformed police captain yelled at Mahmoud to stop filming, but a sniper shot him in the head before he could react. "They meant to kill him. They aimed at his head with live ammunition," Abdel-Alim said on Al-Jazeera. "The perpetrator did this to him because he was filming what was happening. They didn't want us to cover the massacre that happened that day."
Mahmoud died after six days in a hospital in Cairo. His death was the first reported media fatality during the Egyptian uprising that started on January 25.