A man who tortured and killed his wife after tying her to the bed for 17 days, was sentenced to 7 years in prison in al-Arish, northeast of Cairo, reported al-Dostour newspaper. The man tortured and killed his wife after she had hung her undergarments in an area of the house that made it visible for outsiders to see. The husband, a street salesman named Ahmed Saleh Eryan, 26, a Palestinian resident of al-Arish – some 20 minutes from the Gaza border – tied his Egyptian wife Ghada Ibrahim Abdel Mon'em, 16, to the bed after stripping her naked after he saw her wet underwear drying in a discernible spot inside their apartment. He kept her naked, starving for 17 days while he repeatedly hit her with a “sharp metal tool” according to the medical examination. He also beat her and put out cigarettes on her body. He lied to her parents and told them “she was sick because he punished her.” When her parents finally arrived after 17 days, they found her tied up in bed and covered in “rotten” untreated wounds, dried blood and cigarettes burns all over her 16-year-old body. They rushed her to a hospital, but she died before arriving. The cause of death was later determined as “fractured scull due to the use of sharp metal tool.” The husband was arrested and put on trial, where he earlier this month received the sentence. There are no estimates of honor killing victims in Egypt due to the lack of reporting these crimes to the police. Victims of rape are also reported victims of honor killings in Egypt and the region. A World Health Organization (WHO) study entitled “World Report on Violence and Health” revealed that many women's deaths in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria found 47 percent of the women who were killed, were murdered by a relative after the woman had been raped. Religious leaders in the country do not seem to give much weight to condemning honor killings or domestic violence and the talk about women in their weekly Friday speeches mostly revolves around the need for modesty in female behavior and dress. The late head of Al-Azhar Mohamed Tantawy, often spoke against violent crimes against women, but due to the fact that he was an official working for the government, people discredited many of the official religious statements and took advice from their neighborhood sheikh, which is not always in favor of women. Despite the high number of honor killings in Islamic countries, the problem is not uniquely Middle Eastern. According to a 2002 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, honor killings takes place in Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Morocco and other Mediterranean and Gulf countries. It has also been reported in Western countries such as Germany, France and Britain within immigrant communities. Brazil is cited as a case in point, where killing is justified to defend the honor of the husband in the case of adultery. However, the percentage of lenient sentences seems to occur more in conservative Upper Egypt than elsewhere in the country, where family codes and morals rule strongly and honor is placed extremely high as a virtue. Many legal analysts say that due to legal loopholes and lenient judges, many honor killing criminals get off with reduced sentences. Article 17 of the Penal Code Judicial Discretion allows reduced punishment in certain circumstances, which are often used in honor killing cases that allow killers to be set free. Local media reported recently that a man who killed his sister for suspecting she had a boyfriend was later found innocent of having any affairs, and received what many considered a “scandalous” 6 months in prison. It was reported that the judge thought the man's guilty conscious would “haunt him for the rest of his life for taking the life of his innocent sister.” BM
