CAIRO - Five unemployed men will appear in Cairo Criminal Court shortly charged with raping and kidnapping of a 22-year-old woman in the southern neighbourhood of Helwan on Tuesday, security sources said. The victim, identified only as S.B, was found naked with a single stab wound to the left arm in an apartment owned by one of the rapists, the sources said. The victim's fiancé, Khalid Ahmed Mahmoud, was stabbed in the stomach chest and neck, but survived, they said. All the defendants, aged in their late teens to early 30s, deny stabbing Khalid and the kidnap, rape and grievous bodily harm of the man his fianceé. S.B was abducted by the five men on Tuesday night while she was walking with Khalid in a Helwan street. Helwan Police allocated officers in the hunt for the girl's attackers, who dragged the victim to a nearby apartment, where they gang raped her, the sources said. The five defendants, all from Helwan, could be sentenced to death if found guilty, they added. Police in Egypt, are struggling to contain a surge in gang-related crime and rape cases, after the January 25 revolution. "What has worried us is that lately crimes have become repulsive, violent. We are investigating how these criminals act," a security source said. "These (gangs) are growing like mushrooms. Something is going on and it is not because of lack of police control," he said. He said most of the gang members were young males between 14 and 30 years old and were active in some of the remote neighbourhoods, where there is little police control. In the first six months of the year, the police and the military police (MP) registered hundreds of rape crimes every week.
