A lonely death: A man sent down for three years for drug-related offences was found dead in his cell in the disciplinary block in Assiut Prison. The prison governor told the police that Mohamed Ibrahim (41) had managed to hang himself with his sheet. Other inmates said he'd been put in solitary because he kept arguing with guards and his fellow prisoners. Deadly demolition: When a young man went to visit his fiancée and her family in Manshiyet Nasser, eastern Cairo, things didn't turn out quite as expected or hoped for. During his visit, the gas cylinder in their kitchen blew up, killing him and injuring his intended and five other residents in the (now demolished) building. The force of the blast propelled Ihab Rashwan (28), who owned a mobile phone shop, and his fiancée down onto the street, where his lifeless body was found lying next to his injured beloved, whose family shared the three-floor building they lived in with two other families. It was while his sweetheart's younger sister and mother were preparing them some dinner in the kitchen that the cylinder blew up, leaving Iman (20) bereft of her fiancé. She and Ihab had been chatting together on the balcony of the flat, when the explosion tore it from under their feet and they fell into the street below. The devoted couple were due to get married in the summer. A young man, who happened to be walking past, was also injured when he was hit by bits of the balcony, while one of the walls of Iman's flat fell on a car below. The three-floor residential building was demolished by the force of the explosion. Ihab, an eldest son, had only proposed to Iman a few weeks ago and they were looking forward to tying the knot in August. Because the streets are so narrow and steep in Manshiyet Nasser, a randomly built suburb, ambulances and fire engines had difficulty getting near the blaze that tore through the condemned building, which meant that it took them 90 minutes to douse the flames. Fatal incest: Benha Criminal Court in el-Qaliubia Governorate has sentenced a printer and a housewife to 25 and 15 years in prison respectively, having found them guilty of murdering the housewife's brother, to punish him for raping his own daughter and getting her pregnant. As reported in this column at the time, it was last summer that the headless body of Adel el-Sayyed (48), who ran a billiards hall, was found in his village, Kom el-Atroun, near Toukh. The deceased left a widow, who worked as a maid, and their four children - three boys and a girl. Adel took advantage of the fact that his wife was out at work all day to rape their daughter repeatedly over six months, until she became pregnant and told her paternal aunt, who took her to Shubra el-Kheima to have her unborn child killed. The auntie then got her son-in-law, the printer, to decapitate her brother in her home in the village of el-Hadadeen, not far from where the victim lived. Botheina el-Sayyed (51) and Ashraf Gamal, her 23-year-old son-in-law, then dumped his body beside the Toukh Highway.
