Their Government: Shocking Egypt Police Video Stirs Debate

By MAGGIE MICHAEL
Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- The footage is shocking: A man lies screaming on the floor of a police station as officers sodomize him with a wooden pole.

Compounding the shock, it turns out that it was the police who made the film, and that they then transmitted it to the cell phones of the victim's friends in order to humiliate him.

For Egypt, the ordeal of 21-year-old Emad el-Kabir has been something of a Rodney King moment _ a sudden, stark glimpse of a reality which authorities routinely deny, but which human rights groups say is part of a pattern of police brutality.

But unlike the tape of the Los Angeles police beating up King in 1991, which was aired almost immediately, the attack on el-Kabir happened a year ago, and has only became public months later after an Egyptian blogger posted it on his site and it reached YouTube.

A newspaper, al-Fagr, then published a story about it, and appealed to el-Kabir to come forward. He did, giving a TV interview and filing a complaint against the police officers with the state prosecutor.

That's where the Rodney King analogy ends. Few people in this nation of 74 million have Internet access, and no TV station has shown anything of the offending footage. There have been no demonstrations or riots or high-profile lawsuits. The only person so far to be sentenced is the victim himself, who police say injured an officer with a broken bottle. On Jan. 9, he was jailed for three months.

Human rights activists say police brutality is deeply entrenched in Egyptian life.
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