 On February 22, 2007, in his native city Alexandria, Amer was sentenced to three years of imprisonment for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and one year for insulting the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.He was the first blogger in Egypt explicitly arrested for the content of his writing, and was released on November 17, 2010, but not before he was beaten and detained by Egyptian security forces.He thereafter moved to Bergen, Norway where he obtained political asylum and gained the Norwegian citizenship.