CAIRO: Football mania, fueled by advertising on a scale I’d never before witnessed in Egypt, has seen nationalistic fever spread faster than swine flu. But amid the heightened expectations of victory in the week leading up to the much-anticipated World Cup qualifying game between Egypt and Algeria tonight, two court verdicts seemed to have struggled to find their way to the front pages of Egypt’s local papers.
On Wednesday in Dresden, Germany, the 28-year-old murderer of Marwa Al-Sherbini was thrown behind bars for life. Alex Weins’ brutal stabbing of the pregnant, headscraved Al-Sherbini in that very same courthouse on July 1 had outraged not only Egyptians, but Muslims and non-Muslims all over the world.
The heinous Islmophobic crime began with an incident of verbal abuse – Wiens had called her a “terrorist, “Islamist and “whore when she asked him to vacate the swing in the playground so her three-year old son could use it. She pressed charges against him and had him fined, but the appeal hearing brought them together in court that fateful day when Weins stabbed her 16 times with a seven-inch knife and attempted to kill her husband as he tried to save her.
No doubt this crime will go down in history, not only for the degree of violence and hatred it exhibited, but also for the verdict and the way the German court conducted the two-week trial in a moving display of justice being served swiftly and unequivocally. The ruling also strengthens my conviction that Weins was indeed a lone wolf who represents German society as a whole in as much as the Fort Hood shooter, US army major Nidal Hasan, represents Islam and Muslims.
Weins was clearly a disturbed man with xenophobic and Islamophobic tendencies so deeply ingrained that he premeditated the murder with precision and malice. But still, he was an extreme case who does not reflect the majority and this verdict -15 years in prison with no chance of an early release – proves that, as the judge said, German society has no tolerance for such hate crimes.
Even though it didn’t receive the prominence it deserved, the Dresden verdict did make it to the front pages, unlike the fate of another case that was being heard in our own back yard: in Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria.
On Saturday Nov. 7 justice was served when police colonel Akram Suleiman was slapped five years in prison for brutally assaulting a mentally disabled man last year.
According to a Daily News Egypt report, On July 22, 2008, a juvenile crime squad led by Suleiman arrested Ragai Sultan as he walked on Alexandria’s Corniche. His brother eventually found him unconscious in a hospital the next day after he had filed a missing person report. Ragai, who had been dumped at the hospital and registered under the name ‘citizen,’ spent three days in intensive care after suffering a broken rib and shoulder, a fracture in the neck and brain hemorrhage that necessitated surgery.
Suleiman was found guilty of three crimes: misuse of force, possession of an illegal weapon and causing permanent disability. He was handed down a relatively high sentence, seeing as the maximum sentence for causing permanent disability is seven years. He was also fined LE 10,001 compensation for Ragai’s injuries.
Since 2007, there have been roughly seven such convictions of police officers charged with violence and brutality. One of the earliest widely discussed cases was that of microbus driver Emad El-Kabir who was brutally sodomized at a police station in an incident that was recorded on a cell phone video and widely circulated in Egypt.
In November 2007, his abusers, two police officers, received three years in prison for torture and sexual assault in a verdict that was hailed as a landmark victory for human rights in Egypt.
Although the number of convictions in such cases is miniscule considering the fact that police abuse is systematic and that very few cases end up in court to start with because often the abused are intimidated into either dropping the case or not pressing charges in the first place, the fact remains that since the El-Kabir case there has been a clear trend of abusive police officers being thrown in jail.
It’s heartening to see justice being served in our own courts thanks to the integrity of the Egyptian judicial system and the unrelenting lobbying of human rights advocates, and citizen journalists actively bearing witness to such abuses on their blogs and personal websites.
These are flashes of victory in the long struggle for civil rights and social justice.
Rania Al Malkyis the Chief Editor of Daily News Egypt.
