Bragging behind bars Detectives have made a breakthrough in the case of a businessman called Essam Fathallah, who owns the famous Fathallah chain of supermarkets in Alexandria and whose office was burgled in 2006. Four years later, they have discovered that two of the three men responsible for this crime were the same two men who were recently arrested for stealing more than LE2.6 million from a fishmonger in Alex, as reported in this column last week. After being arrested earlier this month, Mohamed el-Sayyed (26), aka Bogie, and the second suspect, Kareem Abdel-Nasser (24), who owns the readymade clothes shop in which Mohamed works, got talking to their fellow inmates, boasting that they'd stolen a very large sum of money in 2006 and the police had never caught them. They broke into Essam's safe in his office in the el-Manshiyia district of Alexandria and got away with US$92,000, LE56,000 and 180,000 euros. As reported in the Egyptian Mail, they stole even more money from the fishmonger ��" over LE2.6 million. Four years ago, Mohamed, Kareem and Kareem's brother, Mohamed (26), nicknamed Asfour, invited Essam's office boy out for a drink. They got him very drunk and stole the keys for his master's office. The office boy was so inebriated in fact that he couldn't recall what had happened and the trio were never caught, until two of them started bragging behind bars. For both burglaries, the suspects disguised themselves as monaqabaat (fully veiled women). Mohamed and the two brothers burgled Essam just before the start of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in 2006. Essam was going to use the money in the safe to buy large quantities of yameesh (dried fruit and nuts) to sell in his shops, as it's a very popular treat in Ramadan. Kareem used his share of the takings from the first robbery to buy a clothes shop in el-Geish Street in el-Dekheila, Alexandria, where he employed both the Mohameds. He also bought a flat in Hannoville, in the name of his fiancée, and bought her some beautiful gold jewellery and other lovely presents. Shortly after that, Kareem and his fiancée, Hind Kamal, got married. Although they recently got divorced, she has been arrested in connection with the second crime, the theft from the fishmonger, because Kareem hid a lot of the money in the home she shares with her mother in the Meena el-Bassal district of Alexandria. Meanwhile, a fourth man has been arrested in connection with the first case. Kareem's brother and this fourth suspect, 22-year-old Ramadan Mahmoud (aka el-Dani), had the job of changing the dollars and euros into Egyptian pounds at various forexes all over Alex, without drawing undue attention to themselves. When Kareem decided to burgle the fishmonger, Mohamed Anwar, he only got their victim's nephew, Bogie, to help him, in order to maximise his profits. He was very short of money, as his divorce from Hind had proven expensive and his clothes shop was suffering from the depression. (Al-Gomhuria) Dangerous drink A young woman died while making some tea. Khadija el-Sagheer (50) was rushed to Aswan Teaching Hospital after being seriously burnt when the little stove on which she was brewing up exploded. Khadija, from the village of el-Ghaba, died of her injuries shortly afterwards. When the stove exploded, it set her clothes alight and her as well. (Al-Messa) Two very brave men Two young men died along with an old man, one of their neighbours, whom they tried to rescue from his burning flat. The old man was asleep in his bedroom and the rest of his family were sleeping in the living room, when the blaze broke out in Am Samir's first-floor flat in the three-floor building where the two young men also lived. Am Samir's family woke up to see the living room on fire. They ran for their lives out of the flat, leaving Am Samir inside. Their screams woke up everyone else in the building, located in el-Amiria, northeast Cairo, and they also fled. One of those who fled was Waleed Mohamed. He ushered his five-member family out of the building and into the street. One of his neighbours, Hisham Abdel-Moneim, was close behind them, with his wife, who is three months pregnant, and their daughter who's not yet three years old. When Am Samir's daughter, Rasha, told them that her father was trapped inside their flat, Waleed and Hisham showed the mettle they were made of. They rushed back up stairs and into the first-floor flat, in order to try and rescue their elderly neighbour, only for both of them to be fatally electrocuted by some molten wires, which fell on their heads in the flat. Am Samir was burnt to death. The tragedy has shocked the other residents of Abu Bakr el-Sadeeq Street in el-Amiria. Hisham's mother spoke proudly of the son who would do anything to help anyone in need. The family of Waheed, a youngest son and just as altruistic, are equally proud of him. His widow, expecting their second child, is devastated. "We told Hisham and Waheed not to go back into the building. They refused to listen to us; their only thought was for someone in need," she says tearfully. Am Samir was highly respected by everyone and the two young men who died trying to save his life treated him as a father figure. (Al-Masry Al-Youm) An end to the parking problems
A tok-tok driver killed a furniture maker in Kafr el-Sheikh. The pair started arguing when the driver parked his tok-tok outside the furniture maker's workshop. The unnamed driver, who has been arrested, stabbed his victim to death in the street outside his workshop, to the horror of passersby. (Al-Ahram) Handless horror When an unemployed man insulted the mother of his friend, the latter, a painter and decorator, used a dagger to cut off his left hand and then ran away. His jobless teenage friend was admitted to el-Ismailia University Hospital for treatment. The handless victim was named as 19-year-old el-Sayyed Mohamed, whose 52-year-old maternal uncle, Adel Metwalli, told police that the man who'd amputated his hand was a 20-year-old man called Moemen. He, as well as his mother, have been arrested. (Al-Masry Al-Youm) A cheeky trick A young man from Libya was taken in by a cheeky trick in Alexandria. Abdel-Hafeez Ali (39), a Libyan teacher, had come here for his summer holidays, renting a flat in the Semouha district of Alex. One evening, the bawwab (doorman) of the block of flats asked him for the keys to his car, so that he could repark it, as one of the flats was being renovated and a load of sand, cement and other materials had to be dumped just outside the block where Abdel-Hafeez had parked. The Libyan holidaymaker happily gave his keys to the bawwab. But some time passed and he never came back, so Abdel-Hafeez went downstairs to see what was going on. There, he met what turned out to be the genuine bawwab ��" the man he'd given his keys to just pretended he was the bawwab. Meanwhile, the Libyan teacher's car had vanished. Sidi Gaber Police are looking for a thief and the car, a 2008 model, that he stole. (Al-Messa Al-Osbouia) We know how you feel A schoolboy, sitting his differential calculus and trigonometry paper in the Thanawiya Amma (General Secondary School Certificate) exams, became so frustrated with the tricky questions that he smashed a window in the exam hall. Ashraf, a pupil at the Sami el-Baroudi School in Alexandria, gave his arm a nasty gash and he fainted because of the loss of blood. He had to be taken to el-Talba Hospital in the Sporting district of Alex for treatment. Many readers who are not mathematically minded will surely sympathise with Ashraf. (Al-Messa) Near-fatal differentials And that wasn't the end of the problems with this year's differential calculus and trigonometry exam, as it also proved unpleasant for a girl called Amira Amr, a pupil at the Zaqaziq Sports Secondary School in the Delta. Amira was sitting the exam at the Suzanne Mubarak Primary School in el-Zaqaziq, when she asked the invigilator for a glass of water. Amira, who suffers from low blood pressure, has to take medicine for her condition and she needed the water in order to help her swallow the tablets. But the invigilator refused to oblige and the poor girl collapsed halfway through the exams. Her fellow examinees carried her out of the exam hall to an ambulance that took her to el-Zaqaziq Charitable Hospital, where doctors said that, had her heart been beating any faster, she could have died. Amira's father has reported the incident to the police. (Al-Wafd) More mathematical mayhem Meanwhile, there were even more problems in the same differential calculus and trigonometry exam at two secondary schools in Heliopolis. At el-Makrizi Experimental School near Roxy, one of the candidates in the differential calculus exam walked out of the hall after the exam without handing in his paper to the invigilators. He claimed he'd lost it, but the invigilators said that was impossible ��" he and the invigilators have been referred to the Heliopolis Prosecutor. In the second incident, a girl at the Omar Ibn Khattab Experimental School was surprised when she turned up for her trigonometry exam, only to be given the French exam paper. It was only when another girl sitting the French exam complained that she'd been given the trig paper that the invigilators twigged. Fifty minutes into their exams, both lasting three hours, the two girls swapped their exam papers. They only just had over two hours left to answer the questions. But perhaps the second girl suffered less, as the first girl had spent those 50 minutes answering the French questions for her, even though she wasn't in the literary section at school. (Al-Messa) E-mail: [email protected]
