CAIRO — Egypt’s Interior Ministry, already under fire over accusations of police brutality and other abuses, heaped new woes onto itself on Tuesday when its press office published, apparently by accident, confidential guidelines that aim to counter a growing tide of news media criticism.

Memos sent to journalists from the ministry’s official email account contained suggestions about how to counter a “vicious” news media campaign that were triggered by the arrest of two reporters at the journalists’ union headquarters in downtown Cairo late Sunday. One document proposed a rule to stop all coverage related to Giulio Regeni, the Italian graduate student whose brutalized body was found on a Cairo roadside in February.

The accidental leaks provide a rare glimpse into the mind-set and internal working of the notoriously opaque Egyptian government at a time when President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is under intense scrutiny at home and abroad. The Regeni killing has plunged relations with Italy into crisis, while the police arrested dozens of people on April 25 during a rare public protest over the transfer of two Egyptian islands to Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Sisi hopes to counter the country’s continuing economic crisis, which has seen a sharp decline in the value of the Egyptian currency, with large cash infusions from allied countries in the Persian Gulf like the United Arab Emirates. Yet hardly a week goes by when his once-unchallenged popularity is not tested by a new crisis.