Police deliberately filmed their own brutality to humiliate their victim, says matt ford |
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The internet publication of a grainy video showing a man being tortured by police has exposed what pro-democracy activists claim is a "routine" use of brutality by authorities in Egypt.
Appearing on YouTube, the video shows police using a pole to sodomise a 21-year-old Egyptian, Imad al-Kabir. "I felt so humiliated," says Kabir. "They were so brutal, as if they were slaughtering an animal."
The film isn't a human rights expose: the police themselves shot it and sent it to Kabir's friends' mobile phones to humiliate him. The video was filmed in January 2006. Only now that bloggers have released it have two of the officers been arrested. Kabir himself is still in prison on a charge of "resisting authority".
His lawyer, Nasser Amin, says that the video shows "routine torture". The Egyptian government denies torture is common, but
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| Torture victim Imad al-Kabir (above) says it was ‘as if they were slaughtering an animal’ |
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Amnesty International says: "Our research shows torture is widespread and systematic in Egypt - something we've regularly brought to the authorities' attention."
Mohammed el-Sharqawi, a pro-democracy activist, claims police raped him last year, and Egyptian bloggers have recently uploaded other videos of alleged police brutality. In one a woman is seen hanging upside down from a pole, screaming a confession.
All this international scrutiny seems to have made the Egyptian government sensitive. Last week it arrested Howaida Taha, an al-Jazeera journalist making a documentary about torture. She was subsequently released on bail, but a coalition of local human rights groups called the arrest part of "an ongoing policy of terrorising the voices that are revealing torture".
Egyptian bloggers hope to prompt a global groundswell of opinion. "Everyone who is able to take this kind of video or who already has, please publish it on the web," says 'Wael' on Arabist.net. "People everywhere need to see this, to wake up." 
FIRST POSTED JANUARY 22, 2006
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