CAIRO: A court sentenced an Egyptian teenager to one year in jail for sexually assaulting two women in Cairo, a judicial source said on Monday.
At least 38 men had been arrested after they cornered few women in an affluent Cairo neighborhood and sexually assaulted them, ripping off their clothes.
During the last Eid El Fitr Holiday, some 150 young men physically attacked female pedestrians, tearing some of their clothes off on Gameat Al-Dowal Al-Arabiya Street in Mohandiseen, eyewitnesses said.
Police forces were called in to rescue the women and later arrested 38 men while the rest fled the scene. It is reported that 30 of them were released for “lack of evidence while two men, who were caught red-handed, are still in custody.
It was reported later that police forces were looking for the women who fled the scene in fear, to get their statements and complete the investigation.
Three of the victims were taken into custody for questioning, while one of the three witnesses, who don the niqab (the full face veil), said that the attackers ripped off some of the girls’ head scarves as they tried to grope their bodies.
The attackers were between 15 and 22 years old.
The women in question have not pressed charges, but the court said it was satisfied by eye-witness accounts and the prosecution s investigation to convict 19-year-old Islam Magdi, state news agency MENA reported.
Another teenager, a 17-year-old, faces trial on the same charges.
Such convictions were relatively rare in Egypt, which does not have a law defining sexual harassment, but a court in October sentenced a man to three years in jail for groping a woman. However, the man was convicted of sexual assault rather than harassment.
Women s rights activists welcomed that ruling and said it was unprecedented in Egypt.
The Egyptian Center for Women s Rights (ECWR) issued a survey this summer saying 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in Egypt had experienced sexual harassment.
The study said only 12 percent of the 2,500 women who reported cases of sexual harassment to ECWR went to the police with their complaint. – Additional reporting by AFP
