Five people have been charged in Egypt over the suicide of a teenage girl they blackmailed into posting edited images of her on the internet, the second such recent scandal in the most populous Arab country.
Read alsoEgypt: several arrests after the suicide of a teenager
In December, Basant Khaled, a 17-year-old high school student from a village in northern Egypt, committed suicide by swallowing a poison pill. At the beginning of February, another teenager, Heidi, aged 15 according to the local press, killed herself in the same way and for the same reasons, also in the rural north of the country. She too was blackmailed in photo editing, explains the press release published this Sunday by the prosecution in a country where according to the Arab Barometer, around 90% of women between the ages of 18 and 39 said they had suffered harassment in 2019.
The story began with a conflict between the mother of the young victim and her neighbor, whose sons threatened to publish the photos if the former did not apologize. She did, the statement continued, but the photos were uploaded anyway, pushing Heidi to suicide in a conservative society where women are caught between rigid mores and century-old patriarchal legislation.
“Mom, I hope you believe me»
The five people will be sent to court on charges of having “threatened the victim, Heidi and her sister, through a social networking application, spreading indecent images attributed to the former and attacking the sanctity of her privacy“Adds the press release from the prosecution.
Before her, the suicide of the young Basant had caused an uproar in Egypt where the media had published the poignant handwritten letter of farewell which she addressed to her mother. “Mama I hope you believe me I’m not that girl these are fakes I don’t deserve what’s going on“, she said there in particular. The police had also arrested one of her teachers, accused of having harassed her in front of her classmates by presenting her as “trend number one” on the Internet.