Video Shows Egypt Prisoner's Humiliation

Egyptian mini-bus driver, Emad el-Kabir, 21, whom police sodomized, filmed his torture and transmitted it to the cell phones of the victim's friends in order to humiliate him, looks on behind the bars inside a courtroom on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2007 in Cairo, where he was sentenced to three months in prison for `resisting authorities.' (AP Photo/Al Masry Al Youm, File) (Al Masry Al Youm - AP)

"Oh pasha (sir), I beg your mercy. Pasha, forgive me," el-Kabir cries on the video. The black boots of policemen are seen around him, kicking down his bound hands to prevent him from protecting his naked buttocks.

Then the black pole is wielded and el-Kabir screams.

"Everybody in the parking lot will see this tomorrow," an officer is heard saying.

"I felt so humiliated," el-Kabir said in an interview with The Associated Press. "They were so brutal, as if they were slaughtering an animal and peeling off his skin."

In his complaint to the public prosecutor, he identified the voice on the video as that of Capt. Islam Nabih, and said he led the attack. His lawyer, Nasser Amin, said he also alleged that Nabih and higher-ranking officers threatened him lest he speak out.

On Dec. 26, Nabih and one of his aides, Reda Fathi, were detained, and on Tuesday a judge refused their requests to be released pending their trial. The same judge also sentenced el-Kabir to prison. His lawyer says he is holding the Interior Ministry responsible for his client's safety behind bars.

In court, police said he had a broken bottle and threatened to kill himself if his cousin was arrested, then attacked and injured a policeman in the hand and cheek. Al-Kabir pleaded not guilty and denied wielding a broken bottle or harming a policeman, according to a court official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case with the media.

For el-Kabir to come forward at all meant breaking through barriers of fear and humiliation, given the stigma of sodomy in Egypt's masculine culture.

But some break the silence. In another well-publicized case, Mohammed el-Sharqawi, a pro-democracy activist arrested during a demonstration in Cairo over the summer, said he was raped by police while in custody, a claim his lawyer said was backed by a medical examination which hasn't been made public.

In the interview before his jailing, El-Kabir said his family and fellow drivers are supportive, and "From now on, we will not shut our mouths when we face injustice or torture."

But activists say it will take much more than a few videos to change a security apparatus that has wide powers of arrest and infiltrate every corner of Egyptian life _ schools, political parties, newspapers and the civil service.

Egyptian opposition media have claimed that in the police academy, recruits are trained to use torture to extract confessions.

Egyptian officials say they have introduced a human rights training program for police and a commission to investigate torture allegations. They also say cases of torture have fallen since 1999, but give no numbers. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights says it documented 120 deaths from torture from 1993 to 2004, 15 of them in the last year it counted.

Hafez Abu Saada, secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, said his group reports some 400 cases of alleged police abuse a year. He said 20 percent result in prosecutions, and convictions are much rarer.

In 2002, eight police officers were convicted of torturing detainees to death and sentenced to between one and 10 years in prison. Two years later, three senior police officers were tried for torturing a prisoner to confess that he killed his daughter, who turned out to be alive. Their sentences ranged from one to three years, but they were acquitted in a retrial.