Article
Even through a grainy Internet video, the injuries to 13-year-old Mohamed Mamdouh Abdel Aziz are clear. His scrawny frame is tattooed with bruises and burn marks, and his torso is a patchwork of bandages. The video, which soared across the Egyptian blogosphere in August 2007, allegedly showed the boy hours before he died from his injuries, and not long after he was released by police in the town of Mansoura, 75 miles north of Cairo. He had been arrested for stealing a few bags of tea a week earlier, local media reported. The explicit 13-minute clip is the latest of some dozen amateur videos – mostly from cell phone cameras – that have surfaced on blogs within the past year, showing systematic torture in Egyptian police stations.