Teenager sentenced for attacks on women

CAIRO // A court sentenced an Egyptian teenager to one year in jail for sexually assaulting two women in Cairo, a judicial source said today. At least 34 men had been arrested after they cornered two women in an affluent Cairo neighbourhood and sexually assaulted them. The women have not pressed charges, but the court said it "was satisfied by eyewitness accounts and the prosecution's investigation" to convict Islam Magdi, 19, the state news agency Mena reported.

Another teenager, a 17-year-old, faces trial on the same charges. Such convictions are relatively rare in Egypt, which does not have a law defining sexual harassment, but a court sentenced a man to three years in jail for groping a woman in October. Women's rights activists welcomed that ruling and said it was unprecedented in Egypt. The Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR) issued a survey this summer saying 83 per cent of Egyptian women and 98 per cent of foreign women in Egypt had experienced sexual harassment.

The study said only 12 per cent of the 2,500 women who reported cases of sexual harassment to ECWR went to the police with their complaint. * AFP