Fridae

Police have arrested 62 men in Egypt from a well-known gay cruising area, according to an email sent to the Al-Fatiha Foundation, a US-based organisation for gay and questioning Muslims, by Maher Sabry.

In an email sent on 16 September, Sabry, a well known and celebrated Egyptian human rights activist, reported that the men who were arrested on 28 August and were "all charged individually with the habitual practice of debauchery (an euphemism for homosexuality) and given individual case-numbers - as opposed to the group charges levelled at the 'Cairo 52,' which treated them as a single case."

According to the arrestees, the police had two paddy wagons parked at both ends of the Qasr el-Nil bridge, which spans the Nile downtown.

The police started at the shore and worked towards the middle of the bridge questioning, checking identification and picking up those whom they found suspicious.

By the time they converged in the center of the bridge, they gradually herded the 62 men towards their respective waiting paddy wagons on each shore.

The arrestees also said that when they reached the wagons, the policemen shouted to the onlookers in Arabic, "Look at these khawalat! (a term for 'gay' and 'faggot'). The country's become full of khawalat!"

Sabry said that the men were then taken to Qasr el-Nile police station and were detained in jail for three days. All the 62 men were "forced to sign confessions and then they were sent off to the prosecutor's office, which released them on the guarantee of their addresses."

The arrests were shrouded in secrecy and had no press coverage that Sabry knows of, in contrast to the international press coverage given to the so-called 'Cairo 52' case two years ago.

The hearings are scheduled in November or December.

Scott Long, a senior Middle East expert and gay issues researcher at the Human Rights Watch, said that the case is just the tip of the iceberg as the latest crackdown adds up to 14 cases where people have faced sentences and another 150 cases in which a verdict is still awaited, according to PlanetOut.com report.

He added that the latest arrests were not a new phenomenon but part of an established police witch hunt of marginalised LGBT people.

"There have been instances when police would just stroll and pick up gays, as many as 150 people in one go. Because of the international condemnation that followed the 'Queenboat 52' arrests two years back, it's now in the government interest to hush-up such arrests," Long said.