Cairo: Nine Egyptians were Wednesday handed down sentences ranging from life to 20 years in prison on charges of involvement in a series of mob sexual assaults that occurred last month in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
The Cairo Criminal Court also ordered the convicts to pay fines of 10,000 Egyptian pounds (Dh5,263) to 40,000 pounds.
“Unfair. We weren’t at Tahrir,” shouted the defendants as some of them carried copies of Quran.
The rulings, which can be appealed, are the toughest since Egypt made sex harassment a crime in a widely acclaimed law issued in early June.
The defendants, tried in four separate cases, were charged with kidnapping women, trying to rape them, physical beating, and theft during mass celebrations held in Tahrir to mark the election win and inauguration of former defence minister Abdul Fattah Al Sissi as a president.
Families of the convicts, who were barred from attending Wednesday’s session, tried to storm the courtroom on the outskirts of Cairo upon learning about the verdicts. Anti-riot police dispersed them without casualties.
The sexual attacks, which occurred on June 3 and 8, triggered an outrage inside and outside Egypt and prompted Al Sissi to visit one victim at a hospital where he vowed in televised remarks a tough crackdown on sexual harassment.
Egypt has experienced a sharp increase in street sexual offences since the police system collapsed at the peak of a 2011 revolt against the regime of president Hosni Mubarak.
Tahrir, the epicentre of the anti-Mubarak uprising, has since seen several mass sexual attacks.
A UN report released last year found that 99.3 per cent of women in Egypt have been subjected to sexual harassment.
