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Sherif Farhat was led before all the prisoners, and asked to identify them. Murad says, "He said he didn't know any of us, except the 'iron guy'-the bodybuilder-and two others.
These included the guy who informed on us, Bashar. Dokla said to Sherif, 'Sherif, you've ruined me.

Prosecutors told each prisoner he was charged with contempt of religion. Only when led to the transport vehicle did they find they had been given fifteen days of detention while under investigation. I had never seen anything like it, so many police and soldiers. In the morning, the prisoners were taken out and ordered to strip to their underwear. Muharram says, "Then we were beaten.
The policy is not to have the guards beat prisoners, so they can't be sued, but to have other inmates beat prisoners. Many other prisoners participated in the beating. The prisoners were divided into two cells, for married and single men. In Tora, Faisal remembers, "The door was closed for an entire month. We were isolated in the room. They just opened it to give us food and collect garbage. There was no running water almost all the time: only between about 5 and p.
We used to have fights for the right to use the bathroom and wash clothes.
We only had one blanket to sleep on, on the floor. We put our shoes underneath our heads as pillows, and wrapped ourselves in the blanket for warmth. After weeks, the cell doors were allowed open for two hours daily-one hour at the beginning, one hour at the end of the day. Yet the prisoners were never allowed into the open air, only to stand in the corridor.

Abuse by guards and inmates continued. But there were a few who were treated especially badly by everybody-the officers, other prisoners. These were the ones who were obviously gay. Gradually, families learned the men's whereabouts-some through the newspapers.
Hossein told us,. And while the men waited, the media was seizing on their case. Hassan complained, "The newspaper men since the first day had written the dirtiest and lowest things you could imagine about us, every day. And then at Tora Prison they read these things to us, so we could know what scum we were. On May 15, the government-owned Al-Masa', claiming that all the men had confessed at the niyaba to being "Satanists," listed the full names of fifty-five arrestees.
Foreign influences were accused and abjured. The state-owned Al-Akhbar spoke of "the globalization of perversion. Several articles featured photographs of the arrested men, sometimes though not always with eyes blacked out. Maher Sabry, the flatmate of one of the arrested men, began sending news about the arrests by e-mail, from an anonymous account, to human rights organizations around the world. As those organizations responded, however, press attacks in Egypt crested. In July, Rose al-Youssef launched a broadside:.
When a group of U. The media furor augmented families' anguish. Ziyad did not try to contact his parents from prison: "I didn't want them to know because I was so ashamed. It was several weeks after he was arrested. We were desperate. We went to Cairo two times.
We asked people at the courts where the jail was: they only told us, the case is at the High Court. Ziyad's mother told Human Rights Watch that when she finally went to Tora Prison, "the guards were brutal. They searched us rudely: they stuck their hands in my dress, put them on my breasts. They called us names: they said, 'How can you have such a child? In the al-Azbekiya station, Ziyad had met two older gay men, lovers arrested in the case: "They took care of me inside, all the time. All fifty-two defendants continued to be taken before State Security prosecutors, where their detention was regularly renewed.
In late June, they were referred to the Forensic Medical Authority for anal examinations. Sixteen were found "used. A lawyer who worked on the case says, "The charge [of debauchery] did not come up until the third renewal of their detention. Till then, the charges were all contempt of religion and the creation of a new Satan-worshipping cult. All the men were charged with the "habitual practice of debauchery. Their trial opened on July 18, before an Emergency State Security Court for Misdemeanors-a procedure allowing appeal only to the Office of the President of the Republic.
The prisoners tried to hide their faces behind newspaper pages or plastic bags.
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According to a reporter, "Several of their relatives screamed, slapped their own cheeks and then beat photographers, while one prisoner had what guards called an epileptic seizure and had to be carted from the room. The case was moved to a larger courthouse to accommodate crowds. One defense lawyer reflects, "The authorities wanted to send a message, that in this trial state interests were at stake and it was a matter of great public concern.
Ziyad's mother recalls guards jeering at weeping women, "You are the ones who spawned the khawalat," while reporters inquired "how it felt to have a khawal for a child. Hossein says, "Each session we went to in the court, we got a really hard time. Beatings and abuse, and being photographed by the newspapers.
And knowing our families were having a very hard time. Faisal says, "The families asked us to hide our faces so that distant relatives and neighbors wouldn't recognize us, as soon as they realized there would be so much press around the trial. Featured in the global press, their hidden faces became a worldwide symbol of the atmosphere of shame.
According to one defendant, "In prison, after the first hearing, they took everything but our clothes from us to keep us from covering our faces at the trial: they wanted our faces seen. They'd come into the cell and take handkerchiefs, even tissue paper. We would hide it to keep the guards from discovering it. The verdict was handed down on November Reporters joined mobs of onlookers behind a dense police cordon.
Relatives and defense attorneys, both barred from the session, pounded on the courtroom door, while inside, cameramen filmed the masked defendants crowded in the cage. Rashid told us, "The judge was whispering and the officers shouting.
It was so humiliating. I didn't even know what the sentence was until I got back to Tora Prison. We were weeping, all of us, like children, as the truck bumped along the road. The warden was the one who read our sentences to us. I had been found innocent. Ziyad said, "I didn't hear about it from the judge. I was devastated, dizzy. When I got back to the prison and they told me for certain, I fainted.
The report claims Shebl named him as "Naguib the bottom. Most of the rest were picked up on the street, through informers, in the days before May Without interrogating the prisoners, prosecutors charged them with "habitual practice of debauchery," and ordered their release pending trial. View comments Hide comments. Bashar says, "I told the prosecutor I'd been beaten. On Wednesday, May 9, the Vice Squad began picking suspected gay men off the street and bringing them to Abdin. The prohibition of fujur should be eliminated from Egypt's books.
My sentence was two years. Twenty-nine defendants were acquitted, twenty-three convicted. Sherif Farhat was convicted of both "debauchery" and "contempt of heavenly religions," and received five years; Mahmoud Dokla, convicted only of the second charge, received three. The other convicts took two years for the "habitual practice of debauchery" except for the bodybuilder Bassam, who received one.
Each term would be followed by the same period of police supervision.