CAIRO - prosecutors have ordered an urgent trial for eight members of a gang suspected of raping at least ten street children and forcing them into begging and theft activities in the plush neighbourhood of Nasr City, police sources said Sunday. Police have arrested the suspects, including two women, after raiding the basement of a vacant building, which the eight gangsters have turned into a den, where they physically abused and raped the ten victims, the sources said. One of the suspects told Nasr City Prosecutors Ahmed Azzab and Mohamed Sadek that the gang's leader had repeatedly tortured and raped the victims to compel them into committing daily crimes of shop lifting, begging and prostitution on the neighbourhood street. Another suspect, whose name would be withheld for legal reasons, told the prosecutors that the gang locked the children in a concrete room that stank of sweat and urine adjoining a famous shopping mall. Police officers found the children late Saturday after receiving a tip-off from an informer, the sources said. "They searched the building and found the ten children sleeping on bedraggled blankets that had an awful smell," the sources said, adding that the police detained the gang members and referred them to the prosecutors earlier in the day. The children appeared to have been repeatedly raped, a medical examiner told the prosecutors. He said that a boy had scars on his stomach, neck, hands and feet where he'd apparently been tied up by a nylon rope. The children were kept captive by the gang members in a dark and filthy three-square metre room, where they had been subjected to all sorts of physical abuse, a police officer told reporters. "The place stank like a stable and the ground was covered with blankets and cardboards," he said, adding that the gang members tried to stop the police from entering the basement, saying that thhe children were their own relatives. Cairo has tens of thousands of street children living on the margins of society, but reports are rare of them committing serious crimes of violence. "The main reason for this dangerous social phenomenon, as well as other forms of child exploitation such as child labour and child prostitution, is extreme poverty and internal family conflicts that are caused by divorce of the parents, high unemployment, low income, social insecurity and high birth rates," Mahmoud Mohamed, a shop owner living near the gang's den, said. This incident is sad, shameful and awful, Mohamed said.
