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Elections, finally

THE JUDICIAL committee supervising professional syndicate polls has set 23 May as the date for holding elections at the Bar Association.

At a meeting on Saturday the committee decided to start nomination procedures on Monday. Candidates for the posts of syndicate chairman and board members should complete registration measures on 19 April, Judge Farouk Sultan head of the committee, said.

The date for the elections was fixed just two days after hundreds of lawyers held an emergency general assembly at the headquarters of their syndicate to press for staging polls.

Polls at the Bar Association were stopped twice by two court rulings passed by the Administrative Court in October last year and in January. The first ruling said Law 100/1993 regulating polls at professional syndicates was not applied while taking electoral measures. In its second ruling, the court ordered a halt to polls after numerous irregularities were discovered in voters' lists.

The court assigned the judicial committee, currently running affairs at the Bar Association, to re-sort voters' lists. The syndicate council was dissolved in February 2008 after the court ruled that the syndicate's 2005 polls were null and void.

During Thursday's general assembly, angry lawyers vowed not to adjourn their meeting until the judicial committee met their demand to set a date for elections.

Former syndicate chairman Sameh Ashour, who plans to run for chairman, said sorting out voters' lists took too much time and had led to the "total deterioration" at the syndicate.

Sectarianism again

HUNDREDS of Muslims allegedly attacked Christian-owned shops and a police station with stones in Alexandria on Sunday after a Muslim was killed. Eyewitnesses said the violence started after word of mouth spread that a Muslim man, identified as Ahmed Abdel-Razeq Gomaa, had been stabbed to death on the street by his Christian landlords. Crowds of Muslims assembled near a mosque for funeral prayers for Gomaa chanting, "They'll die, they'll die" in reference to the three landlords: brothers Ayman, Atef and Farag Tagi, the witnesses said.

Security sources said the victim was the sole Muslim tenant in the building owned by the trio, and had been injured in an earlier fight with the brothers. The landlords have been detained as were five Muslims who took part in throwing stones at the shops.

Bahaais out

VILLAGERS reportedly attacked the homes of members of the tiny minority Bahaai faith with stones and firebombs in the south of the country this week, driving families to flee for safety, rights groups said on Friday.

Police later asked all Bahaais remaining in the mainly Muslim village of Shuraniya in Sohag to evacuate the village, and by the evening of 1 April all had left, a group of six Egyptian rights groups said in a joint statement.

Egyptian police have detained seven people on suspicion of vandalism in the case, security sources said.

"Because the violence was ongoing, police asked them to leave the village for their own protection," Hossam Bahgat, head of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said. "We don't think that Bahaais would be safe if they went back right now," he added. His group was among the six that sent a statement urging the government to prosecute the perpetrators of the attacks, in which no one was hurt.

Bahaais, who range in number in Egypt from between 500 to 2,000, are viewed by many as heretics. They recently won the right to obtain government identity papers so long as they omit any reference to their faith.

Number 63

SIX-YEAR-OLD Ali Mahmoud Ali Somaa has contracted the highly pathogenic bird flu virus, thus bringing the number of confirmed cases in Egypt to 63. Somaa, this year's 11th case, was visiting his grandparents in Qalioubiya governorate where he contracted the virus. Health Ministry spokesman Abdel-Rahman Shahin said Somaa started showing bird flu symptoms two weeks ago and was admitted to hospital a week later where he was treated with the antiviral drug Tamiflu. Somaa, from Shubra Al-Kheima, north Cairo, is in critical condition and is breathing with the help of an artificial respirator.

Egypt had reported its 62nd case, 21- month-old Hassan Gamil Hassan, on Wednesday in the northern province of Beheira. Hassan was suffering from high fever and was taken to hospital in Beheira. The child had been exposed to dead fowl thought to have been infected with the virus.

Since 2003 the H5N1 avian influenza virus has infected at least 410 people in 15 countries and killed 254 of them. It has killed or forced the culling of more than 300 million birds in 61 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Some 23 Egyptians have died after contracting the virus, most after coming into contact with infected domestic birds in a country where roughly five million households depend on domestically raised poultry as a significant source of food and income. While H5N1 rarely infects people, experts say they fear it could mutate into a form that people could easily pass to one another, sparking a pandemic that could kill millions.

Jumping horror

A SECONDARY school student was seriously injured after she jumped from her school's third floor in fear of her teacher. The girl rushed out of class and fell in the playground. She was taken to hospital in Kafr Al-Sheikh, north of Cairo. A spate of teacher abuse of students in Egypt's schools has surfaced of late. In October, an 11-year-old student in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria died after his teacher kicked him in the stomach for not doing his homework. The teacher was convicted of manslaughter and jailed for six years. Last month, an Egyptian high school teacher was detained after he allegedly threw boiling water at a student's face, angered that the student interrupted him during a break in the teachers' room.