Sir, - I refer to a report in your edition of May 14th under the heading, "Police Swoop on Gay Wedding". This was a Reuters report which purported to record the arrest of 60 men in Cairo at a gay wedding on the Nile.
Since this article appeared I have been contacted by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a non-governmental organisation with offices in San Francisco and New York on whose board I served for some years. The information I have is completely at variance with the report in your paper.
On the night of May 10th police arrested 55 Egyptian men in a raid on a discotheque in Cairo which is frequented by gays. Since then the men have been held incommunicado without access to legal representation or to their families. State security officers have described the detained men as members of a Satanist organisation and threatened to try them before a special security court whose judgments admit no appeal. It is widely rumoured that they have been beaten and tortured since their arrest.
Western press reports of a "gay wedding" are based on defamatory reporting in the Egyptian media and are completely untrue. There has been consistent leaking of prejudicial material from the prosecutor's office describing the accused as "Europeanised cosmopolitans and Israeli sympathisers who were practising deviant rituals and holding parties where they practised group sex and abnormal activities". It is obvious that this is a disgraceful attempt to prejudice any trial by prior press coverage.
The material coming from official sources is horrifyingly filled with racism and homophobia. The denial of legal representation and the refusal to allow family members to visit are clear. The newspaper Wafd reported on May 14th that State security officers had subjected the prisoners to an anal forensic medical examination, which seems to me at least to constitute rape. I have written to the Egyptian Ambassador expressing my concern and abhorrence at this inhuman treatment. - Yours, etc.,
Senator David Norris, Seanad Eireann, Baile Atha Cliath 2.