Manal and Alaa's bit bucket free speech from the bletches

here l am sitting at the airport with nothing to do

i decide to do like Uniball and use the time to blog

i want to write something witty about airports but l just cant

just read the opening of Douglass Adams' the dark tea time of the soul , its the perfect airport piece

instead i bring you tales of torture

last week there was a hearing in the Helwan officers case (where police officers tortured the family of a murder suspect and raped his mother) as the judge was starting he called the defendant to make sure he was present, the defendant (ra2is maba7eth 7elwan) replied from the cage.

in Egypt any one facing criminal charges must remain in a special cage while in court, if he is in custody he is moved immediately to the cage, if she is free she has to report early and wait in the cage.

after a while the judge looked in the cage and could not find the defendant

turns out el pasha the officer sent someone else to sit in his place in the cage with the common criminals while he sat comfortably in the audience bench. needless to say the judge was furious

but this is not the end of the story a major part of al pashas defense was a statement by a bunch of lawyers saying they overheard the victim and her lawyer discussing how the victim will injure herself and claim it was the result of torture

can you imagine the poor guy trying to do his job to protect and serve while random citizens fake rape for no good reason at all, must be tough being a neopasha

oh well, turned out 3 of the lawyers do not exist at all, 2 are not from Cairo and had no reason to be in court to overhear the discussion. and the one lawyer who actually exists confessed to signing the statement without knowing its content.

i wouldn't cross my fingers though torture cases are notoriously difficult to prove, the supposedly independent investigation agency (al neyaba) ignores its job, the ministry fully supports its butchers and even when all these hurdles are passed the result is a joke, last year an officer in omraneya was convicted of killing a detainee while torturing and he got one year in jail for it.