The World - News from May 11, 1989

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government has engaged in a persistent pattern of torture, including whipping, sexual abuse and hanging of political prisoners by their wrists, the human rights group Amnesty International charged. The London-based group said that evidence of torture comes from interviews with some of the estimated 3,000 political dissidents, many of them members of Islamic groups, detained under state of emergency laws since 1986. The group also said it obtained more than 100 medical reports by the Justice Ministry’s forensic medicine department. Egypt’s Interior Ministry said it was “absolutely untrue that there is torture of any kind.”