Egypt general admits protesters were given ‘virginity tests’

AN EGYPTIAN general has admitted for the first time that female protesters were subjected to 'virginity tests' after being arrested at a women's rights demo in Tahrir Square in March.

Hundreds of women attended the protests in the days up to March 9, demanding to be included in the negotiations surrounding the renewal of Egypt following the fall of Hosni Mubarak the previous month.

The protests were violently dispersed by soldiers, who were later accused by Amnesty International of subjecting the women to torture, including forcible virginity tests.

Now an unnamed senior general has told CNN that the allegations are true, and that the virginity tests were done to prevent the women accusing soldiers of rape.
 
"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," said the general. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and [drugs].

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place. None of them were [virgins]."

After her arrest, one protester, 20-year-old Salwa Hosseini, told Amnesty that she had been arrested and taken to a military prison in Heikstep where she and 18 other women were made to take off all their clothes before being searched by a female prison guard.

Hosseini said male soldiers passed by the room and some took pictures of the naked women. Later, the prisoners were subjected to the virginity tests, to which they did not consent, by a man in a white coat. They were told that anybody found not to be a virgin would be charged with prostitution. It is alleged that one woman who claimed to be a virgin was subjected to electric shocks after she supposedly failed a virginity test.

Despite these revelations, the general insists the army is committed to Egypt's transition to democracy. "The date for handover to a civil government can't come soon enough for the ruling military council." ·