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6 April sentences

A STATE security court in Tanta has sentenced 22 people to between three and five years in jail for participating in the 6 April strike in Mahala. Twenty-seven other defendants were acquitted. Inside the courtroom people screamed and fainted when the verdicts were read.

Three people, including a 15-year-old boy, were killed and more than 100 people wounded in two days of clashes with riot police in the industrial city between 6 and 7 April as demonstrators took to the streets to protest against price increases. Over 300 protesters were detained, the majority later released without charge.

The court, convened under the emergency law, allows no appeal against sentences. It found the 22 people guilty of a range of offences including arson, theft, destruction of public property and illegal possession of weapons. The convicted include students, workers, civil servants, the unemployed people and one woman tried in absentia. The man who received the five-year sentence was convicted of assaulting a policeman.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International has called for a retrial in a civilian court. Many of the defendants, said Amnesty, were convicted on the basis of confessions extracted during torture by state security personnel.

Fanning flames

WHEN a police officer stopped a tok-tok (autorickshaw) driver in Alexandria and attempted to confiscate his vehicle the driver threatened to burn himself to death. According to police reports the driver then poured gasoline on his clothes and set himself alight. He is hospitalised suffering from serious burns.

Hundreds of protesters gathered in the coastal city on Monday after rumours spread that the police officer had set fire to the driver. Angry locals joined other drivers in a demonstration that the police dispersed with teargas. Sixteen protesters were detained after a police vehicle was wrecked and stones and bottles thrown at policemen.

Bird flu death

A 16-YEAR-OLD girl, Samiha Salem, died on Monday after contracting the H5N1 strain of bird flu. She is the 23rd fatality and 51st case of the disease among humans in Egypt. Salem, who comes from a village in Assiut, is thought to have contracted the virus after exposure to infected poultry being raised in her home.

Salem began suffering symptoms a week ago after two of the household ducks died and the remainder of the flock was slaughtered in the house. She was admitted to hospital with a high fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, and placed in intensive care. While being treated with the antiviral drug Tamiflu she suffered a pulmonary infection and respiratory failure.

Her death is the first bird flu fatality in Egypt since April. The virus first appeared in Egypt in February 2006.

That five million households in Egypt depend on raising poultry as a source of food and income means that even widespread vaccination campaigns are unlikely to eradicate the disease.

Experts fear the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic. Since the virus surfaced in Asia in 2003 it has killed more than 200 people according to World Health Organisation figures.