Egyptian General Admits ‘Virginity Checks’

A senior Egyptian general has admitted “virginity checks” were carried out on female demonstrators arrested at a protest this spring. Seventeen women were arrested and subjected to beatings, electric shocks, strip searches, and virginity checks, according to an Amnesty International report—which the Egyptian military originally denied. Now the general, who remains anonymous, tells CNN. “We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place. None of them were.” He adds, "The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine. These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and [drugs]."