EGYPTIAN soldiers allegedly conducted virginity tests on female protesters in March to ascertain whether they were prostitutes rather than pro-democracy demonstrators.
Eighteen women interviewed by Amnesty International accused the Egyptian army of abuses after they were detained for their role in the anti-government protests which helped bring down the regime of Hosni Mubarak, The (London) Times said.
The women's testimonies have sparked outrage across Egypt and are a blow to the interim military government, which is keen to distance itself from the discredited regime as it prepares the country for its first free election in a generation.
Human rights activists called for an investigation and bloggers promised to hold a day of online protest Wednesday to demand that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces - which has served as interim rulers of Egypt since Mr Mubarak was forced from power - holds a formal inquiry into the claims.
The women were arrested after they protested in Tahrir Square in Cairo on March 9. They told Amnesty that they were abused and tortured as well as forced to undergo virginity tests.
"Forcing women to have virginity tests is utterly unacceptable," the Amnesty report said. "Its purpose is to degrade women because they are women."
One of the women, Salwa al Husseini, told a press conference in Cairo that soldiers slapped her and gave her legs electric shocks.
"When we went to the military prison me and the girls, we were placed in a room with two doors and a window," she said. "The girl takes off all her clothes to be searched while there were cameras outside filming to fabricate prostitution charges against us later on."
If a girl told soldiers that she was single she "undergoes a test by someone," Ms Husseini said.
Amnesty alleged that one of the women who told soldiers that she was a virgin was "proved" to be otherwise. She was then beaten and given more electric shocks.
The military council denied the charges against the soldiers and suggested that the women had behaved immodestly and mingled with men.
"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine. 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," Major Imam, a military spokesman, said.
"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."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/egyptian-women-accuse-soldiers-of-conducting-virginity-tests-on-protesters/story-e6frf7jx-1226067065045
