Two policemen were referred to court on Saturday on charges of kidnapping a young woman and sexually assaulting her in a police car in Egypt’s North Coast.
They also face charges of detaining the young woman without a permit, Al-Ahram’s Arabic website reported, without giving further details about the location of the alleged crime.
According to investigations by the prosecution, the policemen had stopped a car and asked the man and woman inside for their ID cards. They then forced the woman to get into the police vehicle.
The woman was taken to a deserted place, stripped of her clothes and sexually assaulted. The woman’s screams scared off the attackers, and she managed to text her male companion, informing him that the two men had attempted to rape her.
In a similar incident on 21 December, two policemen were arrested on charges of raping a woman in the backseat of a patrol car in Cairo’s Shubra district.
The two policemen were released on bail of LE 1,000 ($140) each on 10 January. One day later, Egypt’s forensic authority said the seminal fluid on the victim’s clothes matched DNA samples from the two policemen.
In July, Egypt’s prosecutor-general ordered an investigation into allegations that a police officer raped an Al-Azhar University student at an Islamist protest last year. No developments in the case have since been reported.
In August, a German tourist reportedly complained that an Egyptian police officer had raped her and her mother in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada. The officer was arrested but released when the tourist dropped her complaint.
Rape can carry the death sentence in Egypt. In November, four men received the death penalty for raping a woman in Kafr El-Sheikh city in the Nile Delta.