CAIRO: Fourteen Egyptians, including officials and parents, received up to 15-year jail sentences on Monday for involvement in leaking secondary school or thanawiya amma exams.
A court in Minya convicted the group for trying in June to cheat in the dreaded thanawiya amma exams – which largely determine a student s future.
The court found the accused guilty of “having organized leaks, which damaged the principle of equality of opportunity between pupils, in the English language and Mathematics exams, a judicial source said.
Ezzat Khalil Mansour, head of Minya s Examinations Committee, was jailed for 15 years and sacked.
His friend Ayman Rabie was jailed for 10 years for having bought the exam papers for LE 300 and for subsequently selling them.
Four other accused, including a policeman and a headmaster, were jailed for seven years and fined LE 5,000. The other accused, including parents who bought the leaked exam papers, were jailed for between three and five years.
Five suspects were acquitted, including the owner of a bookshop whose photocopier was used to copy the exams.
In a country rife with corruption where some 20 percent live below the poverty line, a university education, especially a degree in medicine or engineering, can help to break down rigid class barriers.
When the scandal broke in June, general prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud said the problem was limited to Minya and did not affect the majority of the 800,000 pupils who sat the exams nationwide.
That declaration was greeted with skepticism by many parents.
Last June when allegations that the thanawiya amma, Egypt’s feared national high school certificate exam, was leaked in Minya governorate, they triggered a flurry of condemnations, an arrest and overdue government intervention.
Ibrahim Ahmed Abdel Meguid, a student at the Social Services Institute, confessed to stealing the exams for the past two years.
He also claimed that this year, he acquired them from the daughters of a member of the People’s Assembly. The reason he was never caught before, he said, was because he only gave the exam to relatives and the children of government officials.
This year, however, he wanted to make a bigger profit and so the scandal was publicized.
The police in Minya began interrogating a number of students who bought the exam, the majority of which are children of police officers.
In response to the allegations, Minister of Education Youssry El Gamal made several decisions.
According to a press statement issued by the ministry at the time, a special committee of high-level officials from the Ministry of Education was sent to the Thanawiya Amma Exam Administration in Minya to monitor the distribution of the exams.
In addition, another special committee led by the head of the legal department at the ministry was sent to Minya to undertake an investigation and report directly to El Gamal.
The ministry also decided that the Minya exams will be graded by a special committee to check for similar answers and indications of cheating. This committee also reports directly to the minister and was to take legal measures in case of any wrongdoing. -AFP with additional reporting by Daily News Egypt.
