Thumbnails of the 3 Al-Jazeera journalists jailed by Egypt

CAIRO – Three journalists for satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera English were given heavy prison sentences on Monday. Here is a look at the biographies of the three:

MOHAMMED FAHMY, 40

Canadian-Egyptian Fahmy was working as a senior producer for Al Jazeera English in Cairo at the time of his arrest. He previously worked for The New York Times, CNN, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and before the Arab Spring, covered the war in Iraq. Fahmy was born in Kuwait. He graduated from Cairo American College before relocating to Canada with his parents, where he earned degrees from Montreal's Lasalle College and Vancouver's City University. He co-authored a photo documentary of the January 25th Revolution, and was a winner of the Tom Renner Investigative Journalism Award in 2012 for producing a 30-minute special documentary for CNN called Death in the Desert. He also wrote a book about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

PETER GRESTE, 48

Australian Greste had barely arrived in Cairo to work as a correspondent when he was arrested along with Fahmy. After freelancing in Britain, he joined the BBC as its Afghanistan correspondent in 1995. The following year he covered Yugoslavia for Reuters before returning to the BBC. Peter spent more than a decade with the British broadcaster, reporting from across Latin America, the Middle East and Africa before joining Al Jazeera in 2011 — the year he won a prestigious Peabody Award for a BBC report on Somalia. Greste's hometown is Brisbane, Australia but he now lives in Nairobi. He also holds Latvian citizenship.

BAHER MOHAMMED, 30

Egyptian Baher Mohammed began working as a TV researcher and producer for the Japanese channel Asahi, which brought him to the 2011 Libyan uprising before joining Al Jazeera last year as a producer. He has two children and lives in Cairo. His father was at one point the manager of the Muslim Brotherhood channel, called January 25, which was launched after Egypt's 2011 uprising.