No welcome to Suez visitors; passengers saved from train fire
The highlight of the crime scene this week was the arrest of a gang specialized in stealing corpses from the Bab Al-Wazir graveyard in Old Cairo.
Arabic dailies reported that, while driving past on Salah Salem Road, a police night patrol spotted a man beckoning to a truck to turn into the alley leading to the graveyard. They then saw three men carrying big sacks, obviously filled with bones and corpses. Upon confronting them, the three escaped. The driver, however, was arrested and guided the police to his accomplices hiding places. The gang’s leaders Usama Mahmoud (50) and Essam Salah (21), both unemployed, masterminded the robbery of the graves, using the skill of Essam, a former grave-digger and the help of a trio: Ahmed Abdel Aziz (41), a truck driver; Ashraf, a Qasr Al-Aini nurse; and Farouk Al-Ashry, a junk dealer.
Upon their arrest, all confessed to have been conspiring to steal corpses and remains for the last three months with the aim of selling them to medical students and specialists for experimentation. They were reported to have opened 21 graves and sold their contents in two other such robberies. But they were caught red-handed the third time as they tried to walk away with 50 skulls and other types of remains.
Their interest in robbing graves was aroused when a father of a medical student complained to the three of them that he was finding difficulty trying to get a skull for his son. Having managed to steal 10 skulls, the unemployed duo and their accomplice the truck driver had to face the problem of selling the items. But one of them had connections with the junk dealer. T he junk dealer helped them through his link with the nurse who offered to treat the skulls with formaldehyde and sell them to medical students.
Al-Akhabr reported one of the oddest thefts to date. Some thieves stole the mammoth metal gate to the city of Suez that reads, “Welcome to Suez. Weighing 15,000 kg, the gate, which marks the access to the city at the 18 km point on the Cairo-Suez road, was disconnected, sawed into pieces, shipped on trucks and sold to junk dealers. The thieves were arrested along with a junk dealer and confessed to the theft.
But it seems that the theft of public property has become quite popular, for Al-Akhbar also reported that five persons were acquitted of the charge of stealing the cable wires that supply the Luxor airport with electricity. The daily added that the search was still on for the true culprits. An airport guard discovered the theft when he noticed that the generators that operate during power blackouts had been working for 24 hours continuously. Five people were arrested with wire in their possession, but the specialists at the airport confirmed that it was not the type used in the cable.
Train passengers were miraculously saved when a fire that broke out in one of the engines was put out before it raged on to the other cars, reported Al-Gomhuriah. The Sohag-bound train that started from Alexandria had to make an emergency stop for 25 minutes after one of the alfalfa fields skirting the railway track at Al-Ayat village caught fire. The locomotive’s wheels caught fire as the train moved past the field, endangering the safety of the passengers.
