The Vermont case Security brings the curtain down on the most famous rape case in Egypt

After years of investigation and controversy in the Fairmont case, the most famous rape case in Egypt, the Public Prosecution office in Egypt has decided to close the e-mail created on the occasion of the investigations into the assault on a girl at the Fairmont Nile City Hotel.

Today, Tuesday, the Public Prosecution issued a temporary order that there is no ground to file a criminal case in the case of sexual intercourse with a female without her consent in the Fairmont Nile City Hotel during 2014, due to insufficient evidence against the accused, and ordered the release of the detainees in pretrial detention.

The Public Prosecution’s investigations into the incident lasted for about 9 months, during which all procedures were exhausted in an effort to reach its truth, and concluded that its circumstances ended in the accused intercourse with the victim without her consent in a suite at the hotel in case she lost consciousness during a private party she attended in 2014, but the evidence did not reach the limit. Sufficient against the accused to bring them to criminal trial.

The investigations had gone through two phases, the first in which the Public Prosecution monitored at the end of July last year what was circulated about the incident on various social media sites and the opinions differed between denouncing the accused or claiming that the incident was not true, then it listened to the victim and one witness was in the ward The location of the incident on the night of its occurrence, and thirty-nine witnesses, including those who saw seconds of a video clip to film the incident in a period of time close to its occurrence, and others who heard about it and the clip without watching it and knew a little about its circumstances, as well as hotel officials, forensic doctors and police officers who conducted their investigations about the incident. Photographs of the naked girl's body were submitted to the Public Prosecution, in which neither her face nor anyone else appears, and they were attributed to a video clip of the incident that was taken from it.

Since the beginning of the investigations, the Public Prosecution has been keen to take action against the accused, listing them on the lists of those prohibited from traveling and anticipating arrival, and ordered their arrest and bringing them, and issued international arrest warrants for the accused who left the country following the circulating on social media and before the investigations began. Three of them were arrested in Lebanon and another inside the country.

As the investigations in their first stage reached the circulation of a video clip of the incident during a period after its occurrence and the frequency of watching it without submitting it to the Public Prosecution, and its availability would contribute to revealing the truth of the incident, and the Public Prosecution took an unprecedented measure that kept pace with the circumstances of the case and its condition in a second stage of its investigations. In its eagerness to take all means to reach the truth, it called on all citizens, through an official statement it issued on 24/2/2021, to submit the clip to it, if any, directly or by sending it via an email created specifically for that and guaranteed him the necessary technical protection, so the Public Prosecution received Through it, audio recordings of conversations attributed to some witnesses, so she summoned them to ask them about it, to clarify the truth of what was in it, and conducted its investigations into the new circumstances, including a witness’s admission that he had received a video clip of the incident via his e-mail during 2015, and he deleted it without watching it, so the Public Prosecution obtained data from him The mail and the computer activated with it, and I addressed the company that owns the site on which the mail was created, which runs its servers, in an attempt to retrieve the clip. It is reported that a foreign girl residing in an Arab country is keeping the photograph. The Public Prosecution asked the judicial authorities of that country to question her and provided information that helps identify her, so she was summoned and denied having the clip.

Insufficient evidence

After the investigations were completed, the Public Prosecution resubmitted the papers to assess the evidence it contained and its sufficiency against the accused. It turned out that it had obtained several aspects that made it insufficient to bring them to criminal trial, as the apparent difference in the date of the ceremony in question had a significant impact on the validity of the witnesses’ statements. And then definitively identifying the perpetrators of the incident, its parties and their roles, in addition to the fact that the investigations’ failure to find a video clip of the incident or someone’s initiative to present it undermined the strength of the evidence in the papers.

The pictures of the naked body of the girl, which were presented as being taken from the filming of the incident, were not cut out with regard to the victim because there was no distinguishing feature in them, especially since many of the witnesses who were shown by the Public Prosecution of those pictures were unable to determine the identity of those in it, and their head was the only witness in the scene. investigations.

Likewise, the inaction in reporting the incident for a period of nearly six years created a practical difficulty for the Public Prosecution to obtain evidence in the lawsuit, especially the material and technical ones, which have a productive effect and definitively indicate that the accused committed the incident.

In addition, the only witness who was in the wing where the incident occurred at the time of its occurrence witnessed only a small part of it that did not include the intercourse of the accused and the victim, who decided that he was not related to her at the time, but later learned from others that she was the one concerned with the incident.

The witnesses’ statements have also conflicted between inserting a drug to the victim during the accident or taking it on her own will. Likewise, some of them changed what they had previously made. Including that a witness changed what he had previously decided by seeing an accused person in a video clip of the incident proceeding to rape the victim, as he returned and decided that he did not see that in the clip and that his previous version was nothing but a pure audio narration that he quoted from other witnesses who did not, in turn, provide those details in the investigations Likewise, another witness altered what had been stated above and decided that he was able to distinguish the voice of one of the accused in the aforementioned passage, in addition to the fact that some witnesses had decided to see the aforementioned passage through the phone of one of them, who, facing him, categorically denied that by not having a precedent of possession of the passage in the first place. They watched the filming and saw the position of the victim in it, in addition to the fact that many of the witnesses had their narrations heard from others without specifying to the Public Prosecution the sources from which they drew their information, which made it impossible to trace those sources to ensure their authenticity and then to be reassured.

Therefore, those reasons had made the evidence in the papers inconsistent in a way that makes some of them complement each other as a unit leading to the completion of the evidence for attributing the incident to the accused, and therefore it was more appropriate to act in the case by issuing the order that there was no provision in it for lack of evidence.

The arrest of the daughter of an artist in a new case of gang rape at the Fairmont Hotel

The Public Prosecution confirms that its order issued in that case suit It is a temporary matter with which it can be re-investigated if new evidence worthy of consideration is presented to it before the statute of limitations for the crime has passed.