Egypt jails woman for 3 years for ‘harassing’ monkey

AFP, Staff writers News Corp Australia Network

A court in Mansoura city charged Basma Ahmed with “inciting debauchery” and “committing an obscene act in public”, a judicial source told the newspaper.

She was arrested in October after a 90-second video of the incident went viral among young people, school and university students and on social media sites, Al-Ahram reported.

The video shows Ahmed laughing while touching the genitalia of a monkey at a pet shop in the Nile Delta city and making sexual innuendos as people around her chuckle.

Brigadier General Issam Abu Arab, head of the Protection of Literacy Department, was able to identify the accused, according to the Egyptian newspaper.

Basma Ahmed lives in a village in Aja where she admitted that one of her friends had filmed her.

She told the prosecution that she had not meant to abuse the monkey in any way and that she was fond of the monkey.

At court she “confessed … to the incident but said she did not mean to commit an indecent act and that she had been tickling the monkey”.

The video sparked a fierce backlash online and outrage in the Muslim country.

Under Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi laws were recently passed to regulate media and women’s rights as the former military leader consolidates power.

Human Rights Watch noted that in his first years of power, el-Sisi implemented a crackdown on civil liberties and arrests were widespread.

On December 13, 2018 Egyptian authorities arrested a camel driver and a woman accused of having helped a Danish couple scale the Great Pyramid of Giza to take a video and naked photograph.