Egypt's Torture Video Sparks Outrage

Egyptian human rights activists have spent years searching for evidence of the torture of detainees in police stations, detention centers and prisons, but few were prepared for such evidence to begin arriving in the form of a graphic cell-phone video. Even more shocking was the fact that the graphic recording of a man writhing in agony, begging for mercy as he is sodomized with a cane and verbally abused by men identified in an official investigation as police officers, is believed to have been disseminated by those same officers in a bid to humiliate the victim and intimidate his colleagues. On the recording, one of two officers due to stand trial in March over the incident is heard telling the victim, "Everybody in the parking lot will see this tomorrow."

Human rights activists say that systematic police brutality is part of the Egyptian security apparatus, and has been on the rise. Torture became widespread in the early 1990s, but was focused on Islamist militants and their families. More recently, though, non-political detainees have also begun to report being tortured as police seek to extract confessions in criminal cases. Activists were enraged last week when an Interior ministry official in an interview to the daily Masri El Youm newspaper blamed independent media for exaggerating torture issues admitting that "the percentage of torture in Egypt over the past few months has been 5 out of 1000. According to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), torture was found to be even more widespread in criminal cases, even during simplest interrogations over crimes such as theft and fraud. "Police brutality is systematic and widespread," says Hafez Abu Saeda, head of EOHR.

tags: egypt  torture  video  

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